How do I protect myself from Zoom Bombing?
Manage your Invited Participants
Here are a few great features to help secure your Zoom event and host with confidence:
Require a password to join your meeting. Having the meeting invite alone is not enough to join, participants also need to enter the password you set.
Only allow Berkeley Lab users to join your meeting. This is useful if you want to limit access to Berkeley Lab users.
- Read more about Authorized Attendees
- To enable this feature for your meetings, follow the instructions in the screenshots below.
If someone who doesn't have a Berkeley Lab Zoom account tries to join your event, they will receive this message:
Keep Meeting IDs Private
When you share your meeting link on social media or other public forums, that makes your event public. Anyone with the link can join your meeting. Take the following measures to protect your meeting:
- Avoid using your Personal Meeting ID (PMI) to host public events. Your PMI is basically one continuous meeting and you don’t want random people crashing your personal virtual space after the party’s over. Learn about meeting IDs and how to generate a random meeting ID (at the 0:27 mark) in this video tutorial on Zoom's YouTube channel.
- Familiarize yourself with Zoom’s settings and features so you understand how to protect your virtual space when you need to. For example, the Waiting Room is an unbelievably helpful feature for hosts to control who comes and goes. (More on that below.)
- Consider setting a password for your meeting, or only allowing those who are logged into their LBL account to join your meeting.
Run a Security Check up
Click the security button after your meeting begins to explore new features. You can lock the meeting, enable the waiting room and manage participant sharing or chat permissions.
Manage Screen Sharing
The first rule of Zoom Club: Don’t give up control of your screen.
You do not want random people in your public event taking control of the screen and sharing unwanted content with the group. You can restrict this — before the meeting and during the meeting in the host control bar — so that you’re the only one who can screen-share.
To prevent participants from screen sharing during a meeting, click the arrow next to Share Screen and then Advanced Sharing Options using the host controls at the bottom.
Under “Who can share?” choose “Only Host” and close the window. You can also lock the Screen Share by default for all your meetings in your profile settings at zoom.lbl.gov (My Account).
Use a Waiting Room to Screen for Uninvited Attendees
One of the best ways to use Zoom for public events is to enable the Waiting Room feature. Just like it sounds, the Waiting Room is a virtual staging area that stops your guests from joining until you’re ready to let them join. It’s almost like the velvet rope outside a nightclub, with you as the bouncer carefully monitoring who's allowed to enter.
Meeting hosts can customize Waiting Room settings for additional control. You can even personalize the message people see when they hit the Waiting Room so they know they’re in the right spot. This message is really a great place to post any rules/guidelines for your event.
The Waiting Room is really a great way to pre-screen who’s trying to enter your event and keep unwanted guests out.
Other Settings to Consider
It’s always smart to lock your front door, even when you’re inside the house. When you lock a Zoom Meeting that has already started, no new participants can join, even if they have the meeting ID and password (if you have required one). In the meeting, click Participants at the bottom of your Zoom window. In the Participants pop-up, click the button that says "Lock Meeting."
From that Participants menu, you can mouse over a participant’s name, and several options will appear, including Remove. Click that to kick someone out of the meeting.
When you do remove someone, they can’t rejoin the meeting. But you can toggle your settings to allow removed participants to rejoin, in case you boot the wrong person.
You can put everyone else on hold to momentarily disable the attendees’ video and audio connections. Click on someone’s video thumbnail and select "Start Attendee On Hold" to activate this feature. Click "Take Off Hold" in the Participants list when you’re ready to have them back.
Hosts can turn attendees' video off which will allow hosts to block unwanted, distracting or inappropriate gestures on video. It's also useful for that moment when your friend’s inside pocket is the star of the show.
Hosts can mute/unmute individual participants or all of them at once. Hosts can block unwanted, distracting, or inappropriate noise from other participants. You can also enable Mute Upon Entry in your settings to keep the clamor at bay in large meetings.
You and your attendees can doodle and mark up content together using annotations during screen share. You can disable the annotation feature in your Zoom settings to prevent people from writing all over the screens.
