To protect your Zoom meetings from unintentional attendees from joining, we recommend several practices to help secure your meetings from uninvited participants.
Recommended Meeting Practices
When configuring or hosting your meeting, follow these recommendations for the best meeting security:
Before Your Meeting
- OIT does not recommend using your Personal Meeting ID for external meetings as your Meeting ID is static and will not change unless you request a new Meeting ID. We recommend allowing Zoom to create a unique Meeting ID for each meeting.
- For a public meeting/lecture, OIT does not recommend publicly sharing the link to your Zoom meeting, such as on social media platforms or in mass emails that can be forwarded
- We recommend collecting registrations for a meeting and send those who respond the meeting information
- If you choose to share meeting information, we recommend limiting the scope of sharing the information, such as within your department
- Advise meeting attendees, to not share meeting information with others. Encourage attendees to forward requests to you.
- When scheduling your meeting:
- Under Security, you must enable one of the following options:
- 8-character Passcode that Attendees must enter prior to accessing the meeting
- A Waiting Room that holds Attendees until the Host or Co-host admits them
- A requirement for Authentication where users must login to Zoom in order to join the meeting. We do not recommend this as the only option as students do not have Zoom accounts.
- Under Options, you can also opt to enable the following:
- Mute Participants on Entry, which helps prevent
- Approve or Block Entry to Users from Specific Regions/Countries, which can be useful if you wish to limit the range of Attendees in a meeting (e.g., you only want UNLV faculty that work in Nevada to join). This carries some consideration, however, as your Attendees may join from out-of-state or out of the country, or maybe be using a VPN
- Join your meeting ahead of time to browse in-meeting Security options in your meeting controls to familiarize yourself with them and enable any you deem necessary
During Your Meeting
- If you have a Waiting Room, check names before admitting a person
- Avoid using Admit All to prevent unintentional attendees from being added
- Ensure that only Hosts can share the screen, and only enable the option for all Participants to share if necessary
- Keep an eye on the Chat, or have a Co-host/TA/moderator observe it to ensure that the conversation is appropriate
- Utilize the Security menu within your Zoom meeting:
- When everyone has joined, use the Lock Meeting option to prevent new people from joining
- You can also enable the waiting room to check and admit more attendees
- Selecting Suspend Participant Activities will stop everyone form using activities such as whiteboard or chat
- You have the option of enabling Hide Profile Pictures to hide all user's profile photos
- Utilize options in the Participant panel to control specific participants
- Mute Participants Upon Entry (if not enabled in the scheduling process)
- Allow Participants to Unmute Themselves
- Allow Participants to Rename Themselves
- To address a specific Participant, access the Participants list, then hover over their name and open the menu to access the following options:
- Rename the Participant, in case their name is inappropriate
- Put in Waiting Room to temporarily remove them until they are admitted again
- Remove the Participant entirely by “kicking” them out of the meeting room
- Report the Participant to remove them and report them as an unwanted attendee
Need Additional Help?
For additional assistance, please visit the Zoom Knowledge Base for additional articles. You can also contact the IT Help Desk.