Five Ways to Secure Your Next Zoom Video Call

As Zoom strives to ensure privacy is maintained, experts recommend these five steps to have a safe video call.

How to secure your Zoom video calls.

Photo: The Quint

With the recent popularity surge, Zoom has also come under fire for privacy concerns. A recent notification by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) also mentioned how the Zoom app is vulnerable to security attacks.

The company has addressed its security concerns in a recent blog post, in which founder and CEO Eric Yuan announced a 90-day feature freeze to address the existing security issues and introduce new patches.

Zoom also recently announced that it will soon turn on waiting rooms for meetings by default for free and single licensed users. Moreover, all Zoom meetings and webinars for these users will now need a password for entering.

While the company is doing its bit to ensure everything remains in order, experts suggest you can also do your part and have a safe Zoom experience by using the following tips.

Download the Latest Patch

CERT recommends that you should have the latest security patch for Zoom. This means that you can take advantage of everything that Zoom is fixing. So, whenever you see an update notification from Zoom, make it a habit to update it right away instead of delaying it.

Check Zoom’s guide on how to manually check for updates.

Don’t Use the Same Meeting ID

CERT also recommends that using different and unique meeting IDs should be the norm. This will not let anyone from the previous meeting join the next and so on.

Since Zoom has made meeting passwords mandatory, you should ensure that your passwords are also unique and don’t keep a password that is easy to guess.

Lock Your Meetings

Once you’re confident that everyone has joined, lock your meeting room. This will prevent any new person from joining in. You can do this by clicking on Participants while in your meeting. In the participants pop-up box, you will see a button that says Lock Meeting. When you lock the meeting, no new participants can join, even if they have the meeting ID and password.

Take Control over Screen Sharing

Disable screen sharing for others in the call. This means that only the meeting host can now share their screen with all other members.

You can do this by going to the host controls at the bottom of your screen. You'll see an arrow next to Share Screen. Click the arrow, then click Advanced Sharing Options. Go to Who can share? Click Only Host

Follow Video Call Etiquette

There are some basic video call etiquettes that you should adhere to. Mute your microphone when you’re not speaking.

And if you’re using Zoom’s recording feature to record the meeting, it’s best to inform your viewers about it beforehand.