Zoom Security - Best Practices for Scheduling Meetings

Zoom-bombing is a recent phenomenon that refers to bad actors dropping in and disrupting Zoom meetings. Here are some recommended best practices for keeping your meetings secure.

Protecting your meeting happens when you are initially scheduling the meeting. You can also set default meeting behaviors in your profile so that every future meeting you create inherits those settings.

Protect Your Zoom Meetings

1. Use a unique Zoom Room ID

   It can be tempting to create a room ID once and then re-use over again as if it were a persistent space. Be aware that the longer you use a Room ID the greater the chance it gets discovered.

   Faculty using the Zoom/ Canvas integration are discouraged from creating recurring meetings.

2. Only share your room ID with the participants you want to attend

   Do not publish your room IDs on public websites or distribute broadly via large email DLs.

3. Protect your Personal Meeting ID (PMI)

   This is a persistent Room connected to your account. Use it for one-on-one meetings, office hours, etc., but be careful how broadly you distribute it.

4. Create a Waiting Room for Attendees

   Waiting Rooms allow you to control when attendees can enter the meeting. See also: Secure your meetings with Zoom waiting rooms or watch this quick video to see how to set one up and use. Waiting Rooms are a great solution for faculty holding Office Hours!

   Faculty: for waiting rooms to be effective, make sure to request your students use a name in their Zoom profile that you are familiar with.

5. Make Sure Only the Hosts Can Share Their Screen

   This is a global default but can be changed in your personal meeting preferences. Only turn this on if it is absolutely necessary.

6. Lock a Meeting Once It Starts

   Once all of your participants have arrived, navigate to the Participants window and choose More > Lock Meeting

7. Remove a Participant or Put on Hold

   As the meeting host, you do have the ability to remove someone from the meeting or put them on hold via the Participants panel. See: Managing participants in a meeting.

Evergreen's Global Meeting Defaults

The following default settings have been enabled. All other settings are Off by default. You can change any of these settings in your Personal meeting Settings.

• Embed password in meeting link for one-click join
• Chat - Note: Private Chat is disabled
• Co-host - Allow the host to add co-hosts. Co-hosts have the same in-meeting controls as the host.
• Polling - Add 'Polls' to the meeting controls.
• Screen sharing - Only Hosts can screen share
• Annotation
• Whiteboard
• Remote control
• Nonverbal feedback
• Virtual background

Additional Resources

See Zoom's Security page for additional information on Zoom's security features.

Keywords: web conferencing