How to protect your Stanford Zoom meetings

University IT is seeing an increase in Stanford Zoom meeting abuse while also hearing news of “Zoombomber” incidents here and at other institutions where interlopers have disrupted virtual events.

Stanford University IT is warning the university community about reports of “Zoombombing,” which occurs when interlopers disrupt virtual events.

Stanford has already implemented a number of default controls to improve the security of Zoom sessions. But there’s more that members of the Stanford community can do to further refine these settings.

UIT has created How to Protect Your Zoom Meetings, a web guide designed to help users get familiar with Zoom meeting settings and configure them to best protect meeting and classroom space.

The guide also offers recommendations to help members of the community use Zoom’s in-meeting controls to manage participants and regain control should an intruder invade your Zoom session.

Among the guidance with step-by-step directions offered:

  • Start by disabling “join before host” on your Personal Meeting Room.
  • Consider the settings you use before a meeting begins. For instance, the meeting organizer can enable only authenticated users to join. Another option is disabling the join function before the host joins. Meeting organizers can also require a meeting password.
  • For Zoom-based classes, consider muting participants upon entry. Enable only authenticated users to join. You can also disable the “play sound when participants leave or join.”
  • To manage participants during a Zoom meeting, lock the meeting when all attendees have arrived. You can also mute all, mute an individual participant, stop a participant’s video, override unwanted or inappropriate screen sharing, remove unwanted or disruptive participants, and block annotations.
  • To manage disruptive or distracting meeting participants, you can follow the recommendations above, as well as limit chat options.
  • To ensure global privacy and security settings for Stanford Zoom meetings, the university has disabled the “allow removed participants to rejoin” option, enabled a recording disclaimer, disabled file transfer and enabled the ability to have a cohost with the same in-meeting controls.
  • You can adjust meeting settings for a meeting while you schedule it or change settings for meetings you’ve already scheduled. You can also change your default meeting settings.
  • If you have questions, call the University IT Service Desk (650) 725-4357 (5-HELP) or submit a Zoom Help request.

Visit the University IT website to see the step-by-step directions.