When coronavirus started, people and businesses moved to different video chats to keep working, one of them — Zoom meetings. As we now see from reports, a lot of people are highly affected by something called “Zoom bombing.” Lots of incidents happen every day, creating really uncomfortable conditions for working. Because of that happened a lot of leaks of zoom video calls, many calls were bombed and forced to stop earlier. Let’s see what you can do to prevent this situation to happen with your meeting
What is Zoom bombing?
So what is Zoom bombing? Usually, this is a kind of internet trolling. Uninvited people somehow get access to video-conference. They are starting to do some bad stuff, such as playing music, playing videos, drawing, screaming, and other similar staff, that forces them to stop or pause meetings. Sometimes people think that zoom — is safe and can discuss some important business information. If hackers steal this information, it can badly affect business.
How can hackers join Zoom meeting without any permission?
Most of the hackers did not use any holes in zoom code or some hacking programs. Basically, it’s all about privacy settings in zoom. When you created a public meeting, anyone can join, if he has that link. Usually, trolls just find these links on the internet, sometimes they are posted by creators, sometimes people leak links for their Zoom meeting. At this moment, big sites like Twitter and Reddit try to ban related posts.
How can I stop Zoom bombing to keep my meeting safe?
Let’s review important steps, which you can do to make yourself safer, also you can just read about privacy in zoom on their official site.
First thing, never share your meeting links, do not post them on Twitter, Facebook, or any other social network, it’s a really simple step. Better to spread links through any other method like email or through a special bot, which will write every participant in a private message.
The second step, is always to make sure, that you set your meeting in private mode, so people should use link+password to enter your video call. Although now zoom company makes all meetings private by default, you just need to check this parameter, if you do not create a new group every time.
The third part never shares with anyone your personal ID. It’s a special meeting ID – which you get when registering a zoom account, it’s important because it never changes and you can’t change it, so if you share it anywhere it can cause real problems. Hackers will use your ID to bomb other meetings. You should give this ID only to trusted and secured contacts, sadly it is needed for fast-instant meetings, simple meetings using one-time IDs. When you understood, that someone stole your ID or you occasionally shared it in public, you must contact zoom support, so they will change it. Fourth thing, if it’s a presentation or lecture, make sure to set screen-sharing to host only.
Finally, is Zoom safe program for video meetings?
As you see after all of these steps, actually zoom is safe, because it does not have any big holes in code or problems with the unsafe connections. Zoom developers do everything to make their programs safer and easier to use. Basically, all the problems come from the human factor, just do these easy steps and zoom will be really safe place to do business meetings, private video calls, or just lectures.
