How to stop zoombombers from hacking into your Zoom meetings

Zoom is becoming increasingly popular but it’s also falling prey to people hacking into meetings and showing inappropriate content. Here’s how you can stop that.

Video conferencing apps are seeing an expected increase in usage owing to the number of people working from home and taking online classes. Zoom is one app whose usage skyrocketed ever since lockdowns started. But this app has one major issue which lets people easily hack into video calls.

This term is now referred to as “zoombombing” and people who do it are called “zoombombers”. What this essentially does is people take advantage of Zoom’s screen sharing feature to show inappropriate content. One such incident was shared by The Information’s Editor-In-Chief Jessica Lessin who said that one person kept sharing pornography in one of their Zoom meetings.

Our video call was just attacked by someone who kept sharing pornography + switching between different user accounts so we could not block them. Stay tuned for next steps. And I am sorry to everyone who experienced. We shut down as soon as we could.
— Jessica Lessin (@Jessicalessin) March 20, 2020

Zoom acknowledged this problem and advised users to change their settings so as to avoid zoombombers. If you use Zoom for your work meetings or online classes, you can change the default settings. Also, this has to be done by the meeting host.

The meeting host has to select ‘Advanced Sharing Options’ by clicking the arrow next to the ‘Share Screen’ icon. Here, choose ‘Only Host’ which will restrict screen sharing to only the meeting host. Another option is to not use a personal meeting ID for creating Zoom video links. Once the link becomes public anyone can join the video call. Users can instead create random IDs and enable passwords which can be sent personally to each member of the group.