Zoom: How to Secure Your Zoom Meetings

Zoom implemented an important update to help make your meetings more private and secure. The most visible change that meeting hosts will see is an option in the Zoom meeting controls called Security. This new icon simplifies how hosts can quickly find and enable many of Zoom’s in-meeting security features.

Visible only to hosts and co-hosts of Zoom Meetings, the Security icon provides easy access to several existing Zoom security features so you can more easily protect your meetings.

By clicking the Security icon, hosts and co-hosts have an all-in-one place to quickly:

• Lock the meeting
• Enable the Waiting Room (even if it’s not already enabled)
• Remove participants
• Restrict participants’ ability to:
  • Share their screens
  • Chat in a meeting
  • Rename themselves
  • Annotate on the host’s shared content

The addition of this persistent Security icon helps augment some of the default Zoom security features in your profile settings and enables Zoom users to more quickly take action to prevent meeting disruption.

The Security icon replaces the Invite button in the meeting controls. The Invite button has been moved to the Participants panel, and hosts can add additional guests there.

The Security icon is available in Zoom's latest release (version 4.6.10) to all Zoom hosts and co-hosts in all free and paid account types on desktop (Mac & Windows), mobile (iOS & Android), iPad, and in the web client.

Read more about the Security icon update on Zoom's support page or check out the overview video here:

Meeting ID no longer displayed

Additionally, the Zoom Meeting ID will no longer be displayed on the title toolbar. The title will simply be “Zoom” for all meetings, preventing others from seeing active meeting IDs when, for instance, Zoom screenshots are posted publicly.

Additional security updates

The Zoom team also updated several features for specific account types:

• Waiting Rooms: The Waiting Room feature is now on by default for free Basic and single licensed Pro accounts, as well as education accounts enrolled in our K-12 program.
• Passwords: Meeting passwords are on by default for free Basic and single licensed Pro accounts, and for education accounts enrolled in our K-12 program. The default setting cannot be changed for those education accounts.
• Domain contacts: For free Basic and single licensed Pro accounts with unmanaged domains, contacts in the same domain will no longer be visible. We’ve also removed the option to auto-populate your Contacts list with users from the same domain. If you would like to keep those contacts, you can add them as External Contacts.
• Renaming participants: In addition to the above in-meeting renaming control, account admins and hosts can now disable the ability for participants to rename themselves (for every meeting) at the account, group, and user level in the web portal.

To get more tips and tricks for securely using Zoom, check out Zoom’s YouTube page or the Zoom Blog.