In the past few weeks, the video communication app Zoom has greatly increased in popularity due to coronavirus quarantines, quickly becoming the world’s second most-downloaded app, Business Insider reports.
People aren’t just using it to host meetings while working from home, they’re also using it to connect with friends and family while we’re all social distancing. Zoom has truly been a boon to us during this hard time.
But some internet trolls are trying to ruin that with a practice called “Zoombombing.”
The New York Times reports that many public Zoom chats have been disrupted by trolls who are using the app to log into public calls and then broadcast graphic, offensive and even pornographic content to unsuspecting viewers, forcing the hosts of the calls to end them.
Zoombombers have ruined everything from public business calls, virtual hangouts and even online classes.
The University of Southern California is facing disturbing online attacks from Zoombombers who are logging onto their online classes and bombarding them with “racist and vile language,” disrupting many of their remote lessons, the Washington Post reports.
TechCrunch reports that a daily Happy Hour social call, hosted by the Verge’s Casey Newton, was forced to shut down last week when a user used the platform to screen-share disturbing pornographic videos from their personal device — and kept logging back on under a different username every time Newton tried to boot them off the call.
Chipotle’s virtual hangout series “Chipotle Hangout” moved to a different video conferencing platform after one of their sessions was taken over by Zoombombers. New York Times journalists were forced to shut down a women in tech event after only 15 minutes due to pornographic Zoombombing, and move it to an audio-only platform. The New York Times reports that it’s not just large events being attacked: Even a Washington D.C. book club was forced to shut down due to the perverse trolling.
The concerning phenomenon has inspired Zoom to share the following list to help people to protect their calls.
- Be careful who you share the link to your public calls with, try to avoid putting it on social media so that it stays away from trolls.
- Avoid using your Personal Meeting ID to host public events
- Using the Waiting Room feature to help control who comes and who goes, don’t let unexpected guests in.
- Manage your screen sharing — set the app so that only the host of the Zoom call can screen share.
- Manage your participants — change the settings so that only people who are signed-in to their account with the email they were invited to the call through can join the call.
- Lock the meeting after everyone you want there is there, that way no new people can join.
- Set up two-factor authentication, then share the Meeting ID and password only with people you trust.
- Remember that as the host you can disable the camera and mute certain participants, permanently or temporarily if needed, you can also remove them.
- Turn off file transfers, private chat and annotations.