Keeping Your Zoom Event Secure and Private
There are many public forums out there, and wherever you are or whatever you are using, anyone with some smarts can disrupt an event that is meant for bringing people together. Here are some tips on keeping your next Zoom meeting secure and private:
You definitely don’t want anyone taking control of your screen or sharing information with the group. Thankfully, you can restrict this by controlling screen sharing. Preventing participants in your meeting from sharing is done by using the host controls before starting the meeting.
You also might want to familiarize yourself with the features and settings available from Zoom. The Waiting Room, for instance, has a number of controls available, and is a setting you should always be using. It essentially allows you to control who comes in. As a host, you can customize all of these settings, and even create a message for people waiting for the meeting to start, such as meeting rules.
You shouldn’t use your PMI, or Personal Meeting ID for hosting public events. You also only want to allow users who are signed in to join your meeting. You can also lock the Zoom meeting. This means that no new participants can join, even if they have the meeting ID and the password.
Another thing you can do is set up your own version of two-factor authentication. With this, you can generate a random Meeting ID, and then share that with participants, but then only send the password via a direct message.
If there are disruptive or unwanted participants in your meeting, you can also remove them via the Participants menu. Is a removed participant wants to rejoin, you can also do that by toggling the settings that you did in the first place. This is helpful if you remove the wrong person.
You can also put anyone in the Zoom meeting on hold. This means that the video and audio connections of the attendees are disables. To do this, you can click on a video thumbnail and select “Start Attendee On Hold.” Totally disabling the video is also possible. This will allow you, as the host, to turn off someone’s video. You can also block things like inappropriate gestures or distracting behavior.
Muting participants is also a possibility during a Zoom meeting. This allows you to stop the sounds of barking dogs and crying kids during these meetings. If you have a large meeting, you can also choose to mute everyone by choosing Mute Upon Entry.
File transfers are a possibility during Zoom meetings, but you might not want to allow this. In this case, you can turn off the file transfer capabilities before starting the meeting. Additionally, you can turn off annotation, which allows people to markup shared documents or doodle. Finally, you can also disable private chat. This will stop people in the meeting form talking to each other, which helps to cut back on any distractions that they might have during the course of the meeting.
ROBERT SICILIANO CSP, is a #1 Best Selling Amazon author, CEO of CreditParent.com, the architect of the CSI Protection certification; a Cyber Social and Identity and Personal Protection security awareness training program.
