To start, whatever you view of the information that has come to light about zoom over the past couple of weeks, or the potential exploits that can “break” into a Zoom meeting,  it still stands that Zoom is a great tool to use.

I am fan and I use it frequently and have done for quite a while. I also however use Microsoft Teams, Join.me, Skype and Face time. Depending on the need and requirements of the people I am speaking and working with.

Now that aside, you can still use Zoom and be secure while doing so. The conversation about end-to-end encryption is for another day, and the sending information to Facebook etc., so let’s focus on some specific things that can be done to be more secure and not lose control.

If posting a Zoom link in the public, then don’t use your Personal Meeting number, save that for specific meeting where you control the audience. Make sure you ALWAYS select the “Generate automatically” option.

Always set a Password for your meeting and if needed send that in a separate email to the meeting participants.

Ensure that you have set the Video to Off for both you as the Host and the Participants. This will ensure no video is on when entering the meeting. You can then determine if video should be used.

Utilize the “Advanced Options” and enable the waiting room, to keep people there until you are ready to allow them in and you have checked them. Mute participants on entry, this will stop anyone who was not paying attention and suddenly joins from sharing their personal conversation with the meeting. It will also ensure that if someone is there that should not be there, they won’t be initially heard. Then, to add some extra security, set the meeting to only authenticated users in, which means they have to sign into zoom to enter the meeting.

Once you are in a meeting as the Host you have some controls that I recommend you use too. The default settings are:

They should be changed to:

Lastly, when you are in the meeting and all attendees you are expecting to be there are in, then from the same menu click “Lock Meeting“. This will block anyone else from joining the meeting. It will display a message and when you click “OK” no-one else can enter.

Now these may seem like simple things, and that is true. Can you fix Zoom, when your machine has been compromised and it hacks the Zoom client? erm…nope, too late at that point.

Can you protect who joins your meetings and what control they and you can do? Definitely.

Hopefully this helps in some small way to you using Zoom, but being a little better and more secure.

Can we do anything about the end-to-end encryption thing? Nope and if that is a big issue for not using it, then I understand and recommend you choose a different tool. There are some greats ones available 🙂