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Zoom bombing - What to do if it happens to you and prevention tips
February 18, 2021
As much of the campus, and the world, continues to work remotely, incidents of Zoom bombing are increasing. Zoom bombers disrupt meetings using charged hate speech, pornography, or other shocking and disturbing methods. There is no place for this at Yale.
Zoom continues to notify ITS that many Yale meetings and events still provide links through public resources which have the password embedded in the link or don’t require authentication. Examples include Yale’s event calendars, public web pages, Twitter, etc. These meetings and training events are vulnerable to being Zoom bombed.
If you experience Zoom bombing
Please familiarize yourself with in-the-moment actions for managing abusive or uninvited participants:
- Report the participant’s abusive or inappropriate behavior to Zoom while the meeting is still ongoing, if possible.
- Remove the participant from your meeting.
- Report the participant’s abusive behavior to the Yale Police Department. The police can request information directly from Zoom.
Prevention tips
To keep those bad actors out, take steps to prevent your meetings from being hijacked by malicious parties. While there are multiple ways to prevent your meeting or event from being Zoom bombed, the most effective methods are to:
- Setup and provide a password via a separate channel or email rather than embedding the password in the link.
- This will protect your event from becoming hijacked. Embedding the password in a public link defeats the purpose of setting a password in the first place. Send links with embedded passwords only after individuals register through authentication systems (e.g., after registering through Yale’s Training Management System) rather than providing the links via the online event description.
- Use event registration within Zoom.
- Using this method, the host can authorize and restrict attendees to the intended audience.
If you need assistance with in-the-moment issues or prevention steps, please contact the ITS Help Desk at 203-432-9000 or visit the website to view answers to trending questions, search how-to articles, start a chat, or report a problem.