What is Zoom-bombing?

Zoom-bombing is the term for when individuals "gate-crash" Zoom meetings. These uninvited guests share their screens to bombard real attendees with disturbing pornographic and/or violent imagery. Most of these are perpetrated via publicly available Zoom links; however, not all depending on your settings. Here are ways to protect you and your guests from falling victim.

Reminders on using Zoom to host public events:

Use Canvas to schedule meetings with your class. If you share your meeting link on social media or another public location (like a public invite) anyone with the link can join your meeting. Here are some tips you can use to help when needing a public meeting space:

Avoid using your Personal Meeting ID (PMI) to host public events. Your PMI is essentially one continuous meeting and people can pop in and out all the time. Learn about meeting IDs and how to generate a random meeting ID in this tutorial on scheduling a meeting.
Familiarize yourself with Zoom’s settings and features. Understand how to protect your virtual space. e.g., use a Waiting Room (additional details on that below). The waiting room is a helpful feature for controlling attendees.

Read on for a list of Zoom features that can help you safely share your Zoom without unwanted interruptions.

Manage screen sharing

Zoom has changed the default screensharing setting to "Only Host." To allow users to share during a Zoom call click on the "arrow" to the right of Share Screen and select Advanced Sharing Options and under "Who can share? select "All Participants."

You can also lock the Screen Share by default for all your meetings in your web settings.

Zoom Meeting Settings

Manage your participants

Some other features to help secure your Zoom event and host with confidence:

Allow only signed-in users to join: If someone tries to join your event and isn’t logged into Zoom with the email they were invited through, they will receive this message:

This is useful if you want to control your guest list by invite only to your meeting. For example:

Use a Waiting Room

One of the best ways to use Zoom for public events is to enable the Waiting Room feature. The Waiting Room is a virtual staging area that stops your guests from joining until you’re ready for them, like a bouncer carefully monitoring who gets let in.

Meeting hosts can customize Waiting Room settings for additional control, and you can even personalize the message people see when they hit the Waiting Room so they know they’re in the right spot.

Works Cited

Zoom. Not Logged into Zoom Message. 2019. Zoom, 2019, support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360037117472-Authentication-Profiles-for-Meetings-and-Webinars?zcid=1231. Accessed 6 Apr. 2020

Zoom Help Center. 2019, support.zoom.us/hc/en-us. Accessed 6 Apr. 2020.