Mark Anderson and Libby Powers chat about Zoom best practices and share the story of a client who recently got Zoom-bombed after posting the details of their call publicly. Zoom has some security features baked in, but be sure to toggle them and use the tips Mark and Libby share to ensure you have the best Zoom experience! And if you’d like to read more about these tips, check out our blog on the subject!
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Transcript
Libby Powers: Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining another edition of Byte-Size Tech. I’m here with Mark Anderson of Anderson Technologies.
Mark Anderson: Hi.
Libby Powers: Everybody was forced into video conferencing in 2020. And there’s a lot of funny stories that actually came out of that, but there’s also some pretty serious things that that arose. One of the big things is “Zoom bombing,” and it actually happened to one of our clients in a significant way. So we want to tell you kind of what happened with them, and what you can do to protect yourself.
Mark Anderson: Great. Thanks, Libby. Yeah, one of our nonprofit clients on the East Coast was hosting monthly meetings, and in order to reach the most people, they decided that they would put the invite for the Zoom meeting up on their public facing website, including the ID and password. I love the ability to reach a lot of people on the web, but you’ve got to be so cautious about the information that you share. So, instead of that, it would have been lovely to have a registration page or something along those lines.
Libby Powers: And during that meeting, something significant happened, right?
Mark Anderson: Yeah, unfortunately, right when they were getting into an inspirational portion of the meeting, pornography showed up on the screen. Obviously, this is not what anyone wants to see or have happened to their rather serious meeting, so they shut the meeting down immediately.
Libby Powers: With the help of you guys, right?
Mark Anderson: Yes, yes, right, and then help them to send out new invites so the meeting was held on the day. But we needed to have a discussion about some very simple things that we all can do to make our meetings more secure.
Libby Powers: You know, those things are going to be on any video conferencing software, right? So whether or not you’re using Zoom or Teams or Citrix or anything like that.
Mark Anderson: So just from a very high level, guys, what you want to do is always have a unique meeting ID even though, in many of these services, you’re when you sign up for them (granted, a personal one) have a unique ID. Be sure to set a password, obviously, that you don’t share in a public way.
If possible, you can also go in and alter the settings for the meeting to either establish a meeting room, have people come in on mute, or with their video turned off, or potentially turned on. In Zoom’s particular case, if you require everyone that’s coming to the meeting to have a Zoom ID, if anything were to go on that would be deemed negative, that activity is tied to an ID to allow you to take a little bit more specific action about it.
Libby Powers: We actually have an article on our blog written about this, as well as some really great tips and tricks for you to secure yourself. There’s a link at the end of this video for that blog. I urge you to go check it out. Thanks so much. Thanks, Mark.
Mark Anderson: Stay warm, everyone. It’s 12 degrees outside right now. That’s our lovely digital window. Okay, bye.
