Securing Zoom Meetings

Summary

Zoom is a remote conferencing service that combines video conferencing, online meetings, chat, and mobile collaboration for online classes. The below steps are ways you can help ensure a safe and secure meeting with your audience.

Zoom Security Tips and Best Practices

Zoom offers a Zoom Security Basics course in their newly launched Zoom Learning Center. The Zoom Learning Center is a free platform designed to educate and empower Zoom customers and users to confidently use Zoom through a series of short, on-demand online courses and videos. 

This 10-minute Zoom Security course will teach you the basics of how to secure your meetings.

Zoom Security Basics

Zoom Learning Center

Steps you can take to help secure Zoom: 

Waiting Room, Passcode, and Authentication

  • A Waiting Room places all of your participants in a virtual room until you let them (all or one by one) after reviewing their names and pictures (if available).
    •  ​​​​The Waiting Room is an important feature for securing a Zoom Meeting. Just like it sounds, the Waiting Room is a virtual staging area that stops your guests from joining until you’re ready for them to join your meeting.         
  • If enabled, Zoom automatically generates a Passcode, and participants must have it to enter the meeting or webinar. 
  • Requiring Authentication to Join requires participants to be logged in to a verified Zoom account or (optionally) logged into a Zoom account associated with a specific organization’s domain, such as bellevuecollege.zoom.us
    • If someone tries to join your meeting and isn’t logged into Zoom with the email they were invited through, they will receive a message that says, “This meeting is for authorized attendees only.” This is useful if you want to allow only signed-in users to attend your meeting and only those from a certain domain — other students at your school or colleagues, for example.
  • Hosts can use all of these prevention methods at the same time. 
  • Avoid using your Personal Meeting ID (PMI): Your PMI is basically one continuous meeting, and you don’t want outsiders crashing your personal virtual space after your designated meeting is over. 

 Adding a Waiting Room, Passcode, or Authentication      

  • Configure security options for an individual meeting:
    • From your Zoom web portal, navigate to the primary menu on the left, click Meetings, and then Schedule a Meeting.
    • Click checkboxes for Waiting Room, Passcode, and Authentication. 
    • Do not publicly publish your meeting room links 
  • Configure security options as the default in your personal Security settings for all meetings:
    • From your Zoom web portal, click Settings, then the Meeting tab, and Security. Click to toggle on Waiting Rooms, require a Passcode when scheduling new meetings, and Only authenticated users can join meetings. 

Lock a Meeting, Remove a Participant, Suspend Participant Activities

  •  In the main meeting toolbar, click the Shield icon. This menu is only shown to the meeting host. 
  • Lock the meeting with a single click so that no one else can join, or
  • Remove a Participant. They can’t rejoin unless Allow removed participants to rejoin is enabled in your personal Meeting settings within the web portal.
  • Click to Suspend Participant Activities to simultaneously mute everyone, stop video and screen sharing, hide profile pictures, disable chat and Zoom Apps, and lock the meeting.
  • Lock the meeting: 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 passcode. Just click the Security icon at the bottom of your Zoom window. In the pop-up, click the button that says Lock Meeting.
  • Remove unwanted or disruptive participants: You can remove someone from your meeting by using the Security Icon or Participants menu. On the Participants menu, you can mouse over a participant’s name and several options will appear, including Remove. Click Remove 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. Hosts can also mute and turn off the video of participants to block unwanted, distracting, or inappropriate noise/gestures from other participants.

REPORT: Report to Zoom Trust & Security

  • Report suspected inappropriate behavior to Zoom’s Trust and Security team during a meeting by clicking the smaller shield in the upper left corner of the main meeting window and then Report. 
  • Or, click More next to any individual in the participants list and then Report.
  • Or, if you don’t have time during the session, click Meetings or Webinars in your Zoom web portal, then the Previous tab. Hover over a meeting or webinar, then click Report to Zoom.
  • Report a user: Hosts can report users to Zooms Trust & Safety team, who will review any potential misuse of the platform and take appropriate action. Find this option within our Security icon or under the green shield icon in the top left corner of your meeting, where you can attach screenshots and other documentation as needed.

Additional options to consider:

  • Go to the web portal before the meeting, open Settings, and set the meeting so that only hosts can share screens. If someone will be, for instance, giving a presentation with slides that requires a screen share, consider making them a co-host 
  • If anyone in the room has their phone number as a display name because they have dialed in, you should change it to their first name or a pseudonym. Dial-in participants cannot change this themselves. You can change it by going to Manage Participants, placing your cursor on the participant’s name, and clicking “Rename” 
  • Consider naming the meeting with a reminder that it will be recorded so that people can choose whether to participate in a recorded meeting (ex: "English 101 Syllabus Overview - Live & Recorded") 

 

Additional Zoom Training:

Linked In Learning and the BC eLearning department provides additional training and information on using Zoom. Recommended that you take the time to learn how to use Zoom.

The Zoom website has a vast amount of information to assist Zoom users. Zoom Support

All BC employees and students have access to Linked In Learning courses.  This beginner and refresher course for Zoom is helpful. Learning Zoom features

Log in to Linked In Learning:

  1. Open a web browser and go to https://www.linkedin.com/learning
  2. Click Sign In in the upper right corner
  3. Click Sign in with your organization account
  4. Enter your Bellevue College Email address
  5. Click Continue
  6. You may be asked an additional time to enter your BC Email address for authentication.  Go ahead and enter your BC Email address if prompted.
  7. Click Next
  8. Pay attention to the next step and choose if you want your new LinkedIn Learning account to be associated with your current LinkedIn account (if you have one) or choose not to associate the 2 accounts.

 

Steps ITS has taken to help secure Zoom: 

  • Employees and students must sign into meetings with their Bellevue College NetID account  

  • Outside guests are permitted, but will be identified as “guests” in the meeting (with notice, we may remove guest access altogether in the future to further secure the use of Zoom) 

  • Annotation, and whiteboard features are disabled by default (you can turn them on as needed) 

  • Although BC Zoom organizational settings and features are enabled or disabled for security reasons, individuals can change those setting in their own Zoom Profile which will affect their Zoom meetings.

  • Recommended that all Zoom users become familiar with using Zoom by taking training as mentioned above via Linked In Learning or eLearning Dept or Zooms website. 

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