Zoom Meeting Security

The following recommendations will help ensure that uninvited guests can not enter or interfere with a video conference. The recommended settings will likely have equivalents in most other platforms as well.

General recommendations

Use a meeting password. The Join URL that you send to participants will include an encrypted version of this password, so you don’t need to worry about sending the password specifically. Without a passcode anyone who guesses your 10-digit meeting ID will be able to join the call or enter the waiting room. Its not uncommon for people to enter 10-digit meeting IDs at random in search of an unsecured meeting to disrupt. A passcode can be set when scheduling a meeting.

Use the waiting room feature on meetings you host. When enabled, participants will not be able to directly join your meeting; you will need to approve them first. The waiting room can be enabled when scheduling a meeting.

If you expect a specific group of participants, as for a class, lock the meeting after everyone has arrived. Even if your Join URL is public or your meeting doesn’t have a password, this prevents anyone else from using that information to join.
- In the meeting, click Participants, and then in the resulting pop-up click Lock Meeting.

Be careful with your Personal Meeting Room and Personal Meeting ID (PMID). Anyone with either your PMID or the link to your Personal Meeting Room can attempt to join at any time.
- Use the ‘Schedule a meeting’ or ‘Host a meeting’ links, rather than the ‘Start Meeting’ button under the Personal Meeting Room tab. When configuring your meeting, leave Meeting ID set to ‘Generate Automatically’.

Lock down what participants can do in your meeting

Allow only the meeting host(s) to use screen sharing (Enabled by default when using a Bard-affiliated Zoom account). when a user begins screen sharing, their screen gets pinned to the meeting’s video output, preventing participants from seeing each other. This could be merely disruptive or quite unwanted, depending on the content of the screen being shared.
- in the meeting, click the arrow next to Share Screen and select Advanced Sharing Options. Set "Who can share?" to "Host Only".

Put participants "On Hold" or send them back to the waiting room.
- If you need to verify a participant that joined a meeting or wish to temporarily take them out of the meeting, the individual can be sent back to the waiting room. If the meeting did not have a waiting room the attendee can be placed "on hold" instead.