What Is Zoombombing and How to Protect Yourself Against It?
Zoom was popular before, but its usage and value has risen even more because of the required or advised social distancing that is said to help slow the spread of COVID-19. Zoom allows to make 40 minutes-long video calls with up to 100 people free of charge. Plus, it offers other functions like a beauty filter or a custom background. Thus, it seems like a perfect tool to connect with family or friends as well as hold online meetings with coworkers and partners. Unfortunately, while some people are enjoying the program, others have invented the so-called Zoombombing. If you want to know what it is and how it could interrupt or ruin your Zoom video conferences, we advise reading our full blog post, in which you can also find information on how to use Zoom safely.
According to apptopia.com, Zoom Cloud Meetings, at the moment of writing, is ranked second in the top downloaded apps chart on both iOS App Store and Google Play in the United States. Its suddenly gained popularity has increased the company’s value to $29 billion, which according to economictimes.indiatimes.com is more than the value of airlines like Delta, American Airlines, and United Airlines. The problem is that sooner or later popular applications, or to be more precise, their users become targets.
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What is Zoombombing?
Zoombombing seems to be an invention of Internet trolls who seek to interrupt Zoom video conferences by connecting to available meetings and showing violent or pornographic content to all participants. According to abc7news.com, Guno Sutiono, a financial planner from Millbrae, is one of the most recent Zoombombing victims. The man was in a middle of a webinar when uninvited guests took over his screen and started showing pornography, racial slurs, and other inappropriate content to his clients. The victim says that the incident was not only disturbing but also has cost him his potential clients. Sadly, this attack is only one of many carried out against Zoom video conferencing users.
How to prevent Zoombombing?
Even if a victim of Zoombombing reacts fast and kicks out the uninvited guest, the attacker can rejoin the meeting again with a different name. Thus, there might be nothing you can do to keep away unwelcome guests during your Zoom video conferences. Especially, if there are more than one attacker. However, there are things you can do to stop attackers from ruining your calls before you set up a meeting.
Zoom users should know that the application allows all participants to share their screens by default. Luckily, this setting can and should be changed to prevent strangers from bombing your Zoom video conferences. According to blog.zoom.us, hosts can restrict who can share their screens during or before meetings. To prevent Zoombombing, hosts should be the only ones who could share their content. All a host needs to do is access Advanced Sharing Options via the host control bar and select Host Only in the Screen sharing section.
Another way to make sure that unwelcome guests like Zoombombers cannot gain access to a meeting is to enable the Only authenticated users can join meetings option when scheduling a new Zoom video conference. As a result, only the users who are logged into Zoom with the email addresses to which the meeting invitations were sent will be able to join the conference. If not, the application will give the user an opportunity to switch account or leave the meeting. Of course, this option works only if you know exactly who will participate in your video call. In case you are inviting people to meetings on a public space, it is advisable to generate a random meeting ID instead of using your Personal Meeting ID. This way, the attackers could not abuse you once your Zoom video conference is over. For more tips we recommend checking the Zoom blog.
How to use Zoom safely?
While preventing Zoombombing is crucial, there are other safety precautions you need to take when using Zoom. No doubt that with the increased popularity of the program, hackers are now looking for its weaknesses more than ever. Therefore, it is important that you install updates as soon as they show up. Truth be told, now is not the time to skip on system or other updates as cybercriminals know that most of us are working or learning remotely and they see it as a good opportunity to perform various attacks. Thus, eliminating weaknesses that could be exploited by attacks should be on the top of the list of the things to do to secure your system and applications.
Zoom recently released its 5.0 version that all users must download. The improvements brought by this version address the Zoombombing issue. For example, the new version sets up passwords for all meetings by default. As a result, Zoombombers should be unable to join meetings if they cannot enter correct passwords. However, users are allowed to change Zoom’s given passwords, for example, to make them less complicated so that it would be easier to type them in when joining meetings. The problem with weak passwords is that they are easy to guess. Therefore, even if using the application’s given passwords might be inconvenient, we advise not to change them if you do not want to risk getting bombed by unwelcome guests.
Furthermore, users should not forget that bad password management habits could allow someone not only to join their meetings but also hack their accounts. Thus, if you are wondering how to use Zoom safely, you should ask yourself if your password is strong enough. Most specialists advise creating passwords from at least 12 characters. Also, they say that such combinations should be made from both lower-case and upper-case letters, symbols, and numbers. On top of that, a strong password cannot contain any personal information, popular phrases, or sequences like 123456 that are easy to guess. Therefore, creating strong yet memorable passwords can be a challenge.
If the task seems too difficult for you, we recommend employing a password manager like Cyclonis Password Manager. It can generate complex combinations from up to 32 characters and keep them in an encrypted vault so that you would not need to memorize them.
To conclude, Zoombombing is a vicious attack that can both terrorize a person as well as do damage to his reputation. Fortunately, you do not need to fear Zoombombers if you know how to prevent their attacks. Additionally, we advise making sure that you know how to use Zoom safely so that your conferencing experience would not be ruined by cybercriminals either. Happy Zooming!
