Are Zoom meetings safe now?

Zoom is popular not only with faculty and staff, who use it for classes and meetings, but also with trolls, who disrupt sessions with racist, obscene, or otherwise inappropriate comments and content.

You might assume your Zoom meetings are cloaked in obscurity by the sheer number of meetings taking place at any given time. Not so — trolls are using automated tools to scan for active, unprotected Zoom sessions, according to a recent article posted to KrebsOnSecurity, a computer security blog. It is now recommended that you require passwords for all Zoom meetings you create.

To password-protect a new meeting, select the password option when you create the Zoom session. At the end of setup, the link to your new meeting will contain the password, so users who enter the meeting using that link won’t even know the session is protected.

You can also edit already scheduled meetings to enable passwords:

  1. From the screen showing your scheduled meetings, click edit on the meeting you want to change.
  2. Click on the password box to enable it.
  3. Send the password information to your participants, or edit the invitation you sent them earlier to provide that info.

Faculty who have enabled waiting rooms have added another layer of security, and we recommend that they continue that practice as well. The password setting mainly prevents unauthorized access from people who are electronically scanning the web for active sessions.