The company is also working with users to educate them in securing their meetings, and is encouraging anyone who experiences a zoombombing to report the incidents to Zoom and law enforcement.Lisa Nakamura is Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is the inaugural Director of the Digital Studies Institute. We have also recently updated a number of default settings and added features to help hosts more easily access in-meeting security controls, including controlling screen sharing, removing and reporting participants, and locking meetings, among other actions.” The researchers are encouraging other services to adopt these features.Īs Arstechnica (opens in new tab) reports, Zoom provided a comment, saying that “Zoom offers unique link capabilities when meeting registration is turned on. While this could help, at the moment only Zoom and Webex allow personalized meeting links. “This way, as long as the insider joins the meeting, unauthorized people will not be able to join using the same link.” So, what can be done? The researchers suggest that the most effective protection is by creating personalized meeting links. Names of other legitimate invitees can also be shared, which allows malicious users to sign in under a different name, which means the Waiting Room feature becomes less effective.Īlso, the larger the Zoom meeting, the harder it is to vet every participant. It means passwords are shared, as well as details about the meetings.

The paper identifies three main security countermeasures that people and organisations put in pace to protect their online meetings, which are password protecting the meetings, avoiding public announcements of the meetings on social media, and using the Waiting Room feature of Zoom to admit people to the meeting.Īs the researchers found, these measures may offer protection against random attacks, but are pretty much useless if the zoombombing is orchestrated by someone with a legitimate invite.

It found that users with legitimate invites to these meetings were either sharing the information with other people, or performing the zoombombing themselves, and that this was particularly affecting zoom meetings and classes in high schools and colleges.

Zoombombing