ZOOM Security Keep Your Meeting Safe From Zoom Bombing

When you conduct Zoom video conference meetings, you want that experience to be the absolute best that it can be for your attendees, right?

Sheryl Plouffe here, Video Strategist.

I help entrepreneurs increase their authority and income with video. And in this video, we're going to be talking about Zoom security features and settings that you can emulate.

I'll share my own settings in my account.

And why we're doing this is because There is a phenomenon that has crept up, unfortunately. It's called Zoom bombing, and that's where uninvited guests come into your Zoom meeting and they share inappropriate images and sounds, and it's disruptive to a meeting. It's actually happened twice in the last 2 days, and not my own meetings, but meetings that I've been a part of. And so it's a very relevant topic, and we want to give you the very best, best practices that you can use to keep your Zoom meetings safe from Zoom bombing. So let's go over to my computer and I'll show you some of the settings.

So I'm going to be toggling through a bunch of different pages here and moving back and forth, but I hope that this will be enlightening to you and also reassuring to you that there are settings that you can set to prevent this from happening. So what I would recommend that you start with is first go to the download center. So on zoom.us/download, is the download center, and you'll want to make sure that you download the very latest version of your Zoom client for meetings. So you'll click this button, it will download a file to your computer, double-click that, follow the instructions, and you'll have the latest and greatest Zoom client for meetings, meaning this pop-up box. So what you're looking at here is a Zoom meeting that is underway right now. I'm not sharing my screen or using my audio. I'm just using this to show you the, the menu at the bottom here. This is the most important thing that we're going to be looking at at this point. Next to screen share, there's a little arrow, and if you click that, a pop-up box comes up that says Advanced Sharing Options. And when you click that, yet another pop-up box appears and you can decide who can share during that meeting. Is it only the host or is it all participants? Again, if we're looking at this from a security standpoint, it's safer to choose only host because that means that no one, no other participant, can just share their screen without your knowledge. So you may opt to choose only host can share. That's a way of not giving up control of your screen while you're conducting a meeting. So this is a way to, again, manage your screen sharing. So that's one option that you want to be aware of. Another one is the security tab at the bottom. When I click security, you'll see that there are two different settings at the top of this pop-up box or menu box here, and one is lock meeting and the other is enable waiting room. The lock meeting means that if I set that, it means that now the meeting is locked. There is no more activity or no more, no more participants that can join into the meeting at that point. It means that we're locked. We've closed the door, we've locked the door, and no one else is allowed inside. The enable waiting room is a waiting room. It's like having a bouncer at a bar and you're behind the velvet ropes and you're in the waiting room waiting for him or her to give you the go-ahead that you can come in now. A waiting room is exactly what it sounds like. You're waiting to be let into the meeting. In this case, my checkmark is already on because I've set it in my settings to enable the waiting room. If you do not have this enabled, then this checkmark won't be there, but you can click it from this menu option and enable the waiting room right then and there. So you can see how I've disabled it. Now I can enable it once more right from the click of my mouse. So these are some options, security options available to you directly from the meeting in the menu, menu bar at the bottom of the meeting. Now I'm taking you into my settings of my account. You can see that here's my, here are my settings. And I'm not doing this through the administrative console. I'm doing this strictly through the settings here. And if I go through, I'll show you what I have set to on, what I have set off, and, and why. Let's scroll through this together. The first thing I want you to see is that this part, the use personal meeting ID when scheduling a meeting and use personal ID when starting an instant meeting, I have neither of those toggled on. My view, and Zoom recommends that you take this approach as well. Your personal meeting ID should be kept not necessarily confidential, but kept personal. Don't be sharing your personal meeting ID publicly. I use my personal meeting ID for personal meetings, for one-on-one client calls or consultation calls and things like that. I don't typically use it to schedule public events or larger-scale trainings. For that, I'm actually going to want to generate an actual actual, you know, other meeting ID. And so I don't have these toggled on. In order to generate a unique meeting ID, you'll want to take account of how you're setting up the actual meeting itself in the scheduling section. So in this case, I'm scheduling a test topic here, choosing the date and the time and the time zone and all of that. But when I get down to meeting ID, make sure that generate automatically is checked off rather than personal meeting ID. And that will assure that you're actually generating a unique meeting ID for that particular meeting. One thing you can do is you can choose to only have authenticated users join your meetings. These participants need to authenticate prior to joining the meeting, um, and the host can choose one of the authentication methods when scheduling the meeting. So I have this toggled on. This is a personal preference. I feel that I could either have this on or off. If I have it off, I feel pretty good about that because typically I don't share my meetings and the links for my meetings publicly. So you could choose to have this on or off. I will show you an article on the Zoom blog, and it talks here about managing your participants. And if you do enable that, it's going to— it's really going to be a case where if someone tries to join your event and they're not logged into Zoom with the email that they were invited through, they're going to receive a message that says that they have to sign in to join. And so it's just another layer of security here for those people. So this pop-up box is linked to this option here, so you can choose to have that toggled on or toggled off. I'm going to toggle it off for now. OK, let's go down here. Require a password when scheduling new meetings. A password will be generated and participants are required to use the password to join the meeting, right? The personal meeting ID meetings are not included. I have that toggled on. I think that is a good best practice to require a password when scheduling a new meeting. Require password for instant meetings. You could choose that. I don't typically do a lot of instant meetings, so I have that I do not require a password for my personal meeting ID because I feel pretty confident that I'm not sharing that publicly and I am sharing it only with people that I really know and trust. Embed password in meeting link for one-click join. I do have that toggled on, so it means that the, uh, participants will join with just one click. Without having to enter the password. And so I think that's a convenience thing, and I'd like to have that on. And I also have require password if they join by phone. Okay, now let's go down a little further. Let's go down a little further to the part where we talk about screen sharing. So this screen sharing piece here, remember how I showed you on the Zoom client there was this piece here where it was the host only. I can set this at the settings level right from the get-go if I wanted to. So screen sharing is, is on. However, it's who can share. I'm setting this in the settings, or I can also do it directly from the Zoom client. Now let's go a little further and look at Waiting room. There it is. Waiting room. So again, coming back to the, the client over here, we had that waiting room option right here. This is the same setting as this. So I have this toggled on, and it's choose which participants to place in the waiting room. And I'm saying all participants have to go through the waiting room. I could also decide to have it be only guests guest participants only. So if I have, let's say, a team of people and I've identified them as users in my organization, that they will be admitted automatically, but everyone else would have to be going through the waiting room. So that's more of a case of whether you have a team or don't have a team. But here's what's interesting. There's a little pencil icon and you can customize the title, logo, and description of your waiting room. You could add a logo. Maybe it's your brand logo that you add here. Your meeting topic will automatically be generated here, so they're going to see this waiting room when they come into your meeting through the link that you provide. You could also add a waiting room description, so maybe you want to write up to 400 characters, maybe some description of the things that people need in preparation for that meeting. It could be reminders. Whatever you see fit. And then also you can edit the title. So instead of it saying, please wait, the meeting host will join you soon, you could say, hey, it's Sheryl here. I'm so glad you're here. I'll be with you in just a moment. I'm just grabbing a coffee. Like if you really wanted to be more personal about it. So those are some interesting customization options that you can use for your waiting room, and you'll want to have that toggled on. If you have it toggled off, then they won't go through a waiting room process at all.

Zoom has a wonderful blog with the latest and greatest information on their security features. So be sure to check out that blog as a resource and watch these other videos on my YouTube channel related to Zoom and so much more. Go set those settings, keep your meetings secure, and have fun sharing your knowledge and your insights with your audience through Zoom. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you next time.