Many of us were familiar with Zoom long before COVID-19, but it’s no exaggeration to say that the video communications platform is now a household name. In fact, the company recently reported that average daily users rose from 10 million to more than 200 million just last month. Not surprisingly, this increase in volume led many hackers to see opportunity to infiltrate meetings for a number of nefarious purposes.
However, there are some very simple steps you can take to secure your meetings so you can safely stay connected with your colleagues (and family) from home. We encourage you to spend some time in the Zoom app to familiarize yourself with all the available settings. Here are some of our favorite settings to keep your meetings secure:
Meeting ID: Do not use your personal Zoom ID for a meeting. Zoom will generate a unique meeting ID if you select “Generate Automatically” in the meeting settings. This will make it harder for outsiders to find the meeting.
Password: The simplest way to keep your meeting secure is to set a password, which can be can be set at the individual meeting, user, group, or account level. Create a new password for every meeting, and make sure only participants receive it. Remember to require people calling in by phone to enter a password as well.
Registration: Zoom provides an option that requires all participants to register ahead of time. If possible, choose “Manually Approve” to ensure only invited participants can gain access
Waiting Room: This feature allows the host to control when a participant joins the meeting. As the meeting host, you can admit attendees one by one or hold all attendees in the waiting room and admit them all at once.
Lock Meeting: Once a meeting has begun and all participants are present, you can lock the meeting under the Manage Participants tab. This will prevent anyone else from even attempting to join the meeting.
Screen Control: You should only allow the host, or people you know and trust very well, to “drive” the meeting and share their screen or files.
Have questions about using Zoom or other Work From Home Technologies? Drop us a line at solutions@thetek.com
