Your Zoom meeting can get you hacked! Here’s how to protect yourself
Apple, SpaceX and NASA are not allowing their employees to use Zoom when working from home. Should you?
The current Coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we work. Having to follow the norms of social distancing to avoid further spread of the disease, all businesses are asking employees to work from home. This has inadvertently created more dependence on collaborations tools. In the past few weeks, we have seen Zoom gaining huge popularity as the video conferencing tool of choice.
As Zoom gains eyeballs from businesses, it has also come under the radar of hackers.
Beware of Zoom bombers
Cyber security experts are seeing may incidents of Zoom bombing. This term has been coined to describe instances when random people ‘bomb’ or crash a zoom team meeting. Hackers are exploiting security vulnerabilities to enter private video conferencing meetings to troll, cause disruptions, steal confidential company data and even commit corporate espionage.
Let us paint a picture. Say, your company is having its weekly meeting with 15 people logged into Zoom. Now with so many people, if one more sneaks in, they will go unnoticed. This person is quietly sitting there listening to all your company secrets. If this person is a troll, they could create chaos by interrupting the meeting, playing loud music, etc.
This is similar to an intruder entering a high profile meeting in your office conference room and taking notes of company plans, innovations and market strategy.
Problem is not with Zoom!
Most experts say that the problem is not with Zoom’s security measures but with individual user’s personal cybersecurity hygiene and limited understanding of privacy settings.
What this essentially means is that people are leaving the doors open for just about anyone to walk into their meetings.
The biggest problem is that people using Zoom are keeping their setting to public. So anyone with the Zoom meeting link can enter the meeting. How do they find the right link, you may ask.
People are posting these links on social forums such as Facebook, Twitter and Reddit for their colleagues, which can be easily found by people with malicious intent.
Another problem is with the meeting IDs. Each Zoom meeting is assigning a meeting ID. People are using their personal meeting ID — which never changes — to host meetings. This means that once a hacker gets their hands on your personal meeting ID, they can partake in any and all meetings your host. Even if Zoom users use instant meeting IDs — which are like one time use IDs — hackers have found a way to guess the ID or automate the guessing of IDs.
Simple tips to protect yourself
Now that work from home is on the cards in the immediate future, here are some simple things you can do to protect yourself and your company’s interest.
First and foremost, change your Zoom setting to private. This will ensure all your meetings are protected by a password. Anyone wanting to participate in the meeting will need the password to access the meeting.
Do not share meeting links on public forums. Use company email, as it will be heavily guarded, to share the links.
Use instant meeting IDs. Even if your meeting ID is compromised once by hackers, using instant ID over the permanent ID drastically reduces chances of your Zoom meeting being bombed time and again.
Restrict video sharing in the meeting. Limit it to one person hosting the meeting. This will ensure hackers don’t get unauthorised access to important company information.
Lastly, be vigilant. Keep an eye out for strangers in your meeting. Ask everyone to keep their cameras on, and not keep a standard profile picture. You all know your colleagues and it should not be difficult to spot a stranger as long as there are not too many people.
Follow these steps to prevent your Zoom meeting from being hacked.
Keep Zooming and stay safe!
