PREVENT ZOOMBOMBING

Author: Michelle Russell, editor-in-chief of Convene

Caitlin O’Malley, DES, an education associate at PCMA, was monitoring the chat on the 16 April webinar, “Get Empowered: Your Professional LinkedIn Makeover,” when she noticed one person asking the same question a few different times in Zoom’s chat function. “I have a question,” Joe typed in, and a second later, “Can everyone see this message?”. O’Malley, thinking he was new to Zoom and needed some help, responded that he had changed his settings so that everyone, indeed, could see his messages.

Other helpful participants chimed in and some provided similar instruction: “Joe, questions should be submitted in the Q&A tab.” Still he persisted, asking, “Does that mean more people than you can see it?”.

Again, O’Malley assured him that, with his current setting, everyone could see what he was typing. If he changed it back to panellists only, just the speaker, event tech expert Dahlia El Gazzar, DES, and O’Malley and her education associate colleague, Judith De La Vega, would see his comments. De La Vega stepped in, again thinking Joe was having trouble finding his way around Zoom. “Hi Joe,” she wrote in the chat, “Please select ‘All Panellists’ from the To: section in the chat, or enter your question in the Q&A box.”

Seconds later, Joe unleashed the same profane racial slur over and over again in the chat. O’Malley said it seemed like it took “forever” to kick him out of the Zoom but, when she looked back at the chat record later, she felt better realising that it had taken her only seven seconds to eject PCMA’s first webinar Zoombomber.

Not wanting to further distract participants in the chat from the presentation, De La Vega waited until the end to apologise to participants for the troll. O’Malley said that everyone was completely understanding. That’s likely because in this coronavirus-related remote working and online learning world, the incidence of Zoombombing – when uninvited attendees break into and disrupt your meeting – is surging.

According to a c/net article, “No More Zoombombing: 4 Steps to a More Secure Video Chat,” it is easy to Zoombomb a meeting – in many cases, all it takes is a simple Google search for URLs that include “Zoom.us”. That can bring up the unprotected links of multiple meetings that anyone can get into. Similarly, links to meetings can be found on organisational pages on social media, the article points out, which is a practice that PCMA, which often livestreams webinars on its Facebook page with a Zoom link, will now change, O’Malley said.

Last week, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan responded to users’ privacy and security concerns saying the company is freezing feature updates to address these concerns in the next 90 days. In the meantime, whilst c/net said there are “no guarantees against determined trolls,” there are some things you can do to improve your overall privacy levels on Zoom. Here are some recommendations:

CHANGE YOUR SETTINGS:

• Don’t use your personal meeting ID for the meeting — use a per-meeting ID, exclusive to a single meeting. • Enable the “Waiting Room” feature so that you can see who is trying to join the meeting before letting them in. • Disable other options, including the ability for others to

Join Before Host. Then disable screen-sharing for nonhosts, and also the remote control function. Finally, disable all file-transferring, annotations, and the autosave feature for chats. (c/net provides step-by-step instructions.) • Once the meeting starts and everyone is in, lock the meeting to outsiders and assign at least two meeting co-hosts (as is PCMA’s practice).