15 Tried and True Tips to Keep Your Zoom Meetings Secure

The recent global issues have affected every person, business and community around the world. We have gone from frequent personal interaction to social distancing, shuttering of businesses and moving a large number of jobs and education to the remote/work from home sphere. 

For Strategic Results Marketing, remote work is business as usual. We have been a global, fully remote working team since the early 2000’s. In recent years, we have relied on Zoom for most of our team and client communication. It’s safe to say we know our way around a Zoom meeting. Our client information is always confidential and we have taken proactive steps to ensure our meetings are as secure as possible. 

We thought we would share our top 5 tips for keeping your meetings, whether professional or personal, free from unwanted participants. Mostly, these are applicable for webinar-style meetings and public events.  However, all of these will help you, your company, and your customers have a safer experience. 

1. 1. Use the Registration Link feature for public events (any event that may be included on Facebook or mass-shared via email or WhatsApp). This allows for a specific email registrant to accept the invite and enter the room. Make sure you also include email confirmations to yourself and the registrant.
   2. Use the Password feature. Requiring a mandatory password will be one more gatekeeper to prevent unwanted guests.  This feature creates a lengthy link that embeds the password into the link. It doesn’t need to be a heightened security password with capitals, numbers or unique characters.  In fact, you can keep the password simple but make sure to change your passwords for different events. 
   3. Message links privately. Be sure to send a private message to members with the Meeting ID and Password to those invited, instead of posting generally to social media. This seems like a given, however since the rise of Zoom in the last few weeks we have seen a number of hosts posting all the meeting information to their social media platforms.  It’s not just your privacy settings that matter in this instance, but also all of your friends’. Be sure to take the extra precaution and only invite via private message on social media. 
   4. Ask all registrants to USE THEIR NAME when logging in. Under no circumstances should you allow someone to do anything other than their actual name. Even if they are logging in from a phone/mobile device. 
   5. Use the Waiting Room feature. Delegate a Room Manager to allow people into the zoom meeting. Only members who are registered should be allowed into the meeting.
      1. The room manager should also confirm that the person entering the meeting is the person they expect. The room manager should rename the attendee if necessary.
      2. The room manager needs to know how to immediately REMOVE an attendee if something goes awry.
   6. Update Immediately. It’s very important that you update Zoom as soon as possible. Often, these include security updates so it is important to spend a few minutes managing the requested updates. Zoom is continuing to improve daily.
   7. Zoom is arguably the SAFEST video conferencing service, or at least equal to the best/most secure as of last week. 
   8. Incredible Growth. Zoom is the ONLY company in history that went from 7M users to 300,000,000 users in 7 weeks!!
   9. SCREENSHARE: Do NOT allow anyone to have access to screen share – turn this feature OFF.
   10. PROFILE IMAGE: Turn feature OFF so that users don’t share an inappropriate profile image.
   11. Understand the Security features (Host & Co-Host ONLY):  
       1. Enable Waiting Room – NO (not necessary)
       2. CHAT – NO private chat, only to host and everyone
       3. Know how to remove a participant
   12. Control the room. You can edit controls once the meeting has begun.
   13. Use the BreakOut Rooms. This allows for increased engagement and connection.
       1. Max is 50 rooms with 200 people.
   14. Use the POLL feature. This increases engagement and allows you to learn about your audience. 
   15. BEST PRACTICES for the host: 
       1. Always keep the Participant list open.
       2. Know the Host Key – this allows you to pull back controls if you have given away control to another host.
       3. Change your Personal Meeting ID password weekly – but keep it easy in case people are accessing calls from a mobile device. 
       4. Screen Share: only allow for hosts, NOT participants.
       5. Annotations:  OFF for participants, just in case.

The request to manage the actual list of attendees on the call is a manual effort. We recommend that the Room Manager also manage this piece since they are in control of adding/exiting attendees. It likely means that the Room Manager will not enjoy the benefits of attending the event, unfortunately. I can provide a Room Manager service for a fee – let me know if you are interested.

Strategic Results Marketing is a user of Zoom and not in any other way affiliated to Zoom.  Here is Zoom’s Best Practices For Securing Your Zoom Meetings. Please check back frequently for updates as Zoom is constantly changing and improving practices to make it a better experience for everyone.