Safeguarding your Hangouts Meet and Zoom sessions

There is a new form of trolling in which bad actors are interrupting Hangouts Meet and Zoom meetings sharing offensive material, and disrupting meetings and classes.

Here are a few suggestions for reducing the risk of this happening to your meeting or class.

Google Hangouts Meet

• Don’t post the link to your Hangout in a public place. Send it directly to your participants.
• Know who you are allowing to join your Hangout before letting them in.
• If someone does gain access to your Hangout, you can remove them.

Zoom

• Don’t post your Zoom link in a public place. Send it directly to your attendees.
• Password protect your meeting. This has the extra benefit of making the Zoom link longer, which makes it harder for someone to randomly guess your Zoom meeting url.
• Turn OFF “Join before host” (do not allow participants to join your meeting prior to you)
• Turn ON the “Waiting Room” feature (you can then manually admit attendees into your Zoom meeting)
• Turn ON “Only authenticated users can join meetings” (this requires attendees to be logged into Zoom before joining a meeting.
• If someone does gain access to your Zoom meeting, you can remove them.
• Make sure you are running the latest version of Zoom and update if not. You can check for updates and download here.