Protecting Your Business Meeting While Using Videoconferencing Technology
In the current business climate, your company, like many others, may have had to become very familiar with or begin to rely wholly on Zoom and other such videoconferencing technology to meet your employees’ usual networking and communication needs.
The use of Zoom, in particular, has grown exponentially due to the coronavirus pandemic. In fact, by the end of the month of February, it had added more than two million new users in just the first two months of 2020, more users than it added in the whole of 2019. Zoom’s global daily active users have risen sixty-seven percent since the beginning of the year.
However, the exponential growth of Zoom comes with its own set of privacy, security, and data concerns. For instance, “Zoom bombing” is a practice in which uninvited attendees intrude in your chat or your Zoom meeting. In the case of a business meeting, these Zoom bombers may overhear or read proprietary and sensitive business information, or they may be generally disruptive to the meeting. In some scenarios, Zoom bombers have even infiltrated online elementary school classrooms (since most elementary schools were closed by the pandemic) and shouted obscenities, recorded the names and images of elementary-age schoolchildren, and shared pornographic images or other such objectionable material in those online classrooms.
How then can you protect yourself and your enterprise from Zoom bombing or any other such privacy and security breaches? After all, in today’s fragile business climate, your business cannot afford to be bombarded by disruptive intruders. Nor should your work product and that of your employees be privy to the eyes of just anyone.
Steps You Can Take to Secure Your Meetings
Waiting Room
You can (and should) turn on the Waiting room feature in Zoom. This tool gives you (or a meeting administrator of your choosing) the ability to screen the potential participants of a Zoom call, keeping out any uninvited guests. Under Account Management, go to Account Setting. Then scroll down and toggle on the “Waiting room” feature. Then, you can select to whom the Waiting room will apply. You can choose to place all participants by default in the waiting room or just guest participants (those who have not logged into Zoom or are logged into a different account. You can even allow participants already on the call to admit guests from the waiting room into the call. Furthermore, the waiting room feature also has a number of additional options, such as allowing you to set up a waiting room for a specific meeting, enabling you to toggle a waiting room on for all meetings using your personal meeting ID, or allowing you to admit all those in the waiting room at once.
Meeting Password
This one is simple: require a password in order to verify the entry of participants. This will discourage unwanted guests from intruding on your meeting. Please go to Zoom’s support page article for detailed instructions on enabling password settings.
Chat Function
Zoom has a chat function that you can use during the video calls to write to everyone in the group or privately to a particular person. However, such “private” chats may not actually be private. Once the meeting has concluded, the public chat and any private chats between the host and another individual may be downloaded into the minutes folder, allowing any participant in the group to read them. If you have potentially sensitive chats, you should review the chats in the minutes folder to help determine if you should give others access to that minutes folder.
Further Steps
Other steps you can take to secure your Zoom business meeting from Zoom bombing and other intrusions include making the host the only person who can share screens, allowing only logged in participants, disabling participant video, disabling private chat, and enabling two factor authentication.
