Additional changes to Zoom security effective immediately

As you have no doubt read in the popular press, Zoom has not only become a target for people who want to disrupt meetings ("zoom bombing") it is also receiving a lot of attention for its security options and practices. Yesterday Zoom enabled additional security controls for all K-12 Zoom accounts as well as for all paid, individual Zoom accounts. Inexplicably, Zoom did not apply the same changes to higher education and corporate accounts. Nevertheless, we believe that the changes that Zoom made do indeed reflect better security practices and will help reduce the chance of zoom bombing.

Therefore, effective immediately we have made the following changes:

 – all Zoom meetings will now default to requiring a password to join, in addition to the meeting ID. The password will be included in the link to join a meeting so most people will not notice this change. However, people who manually enter the meeting ID will now also need to enter the meeting password, which can be found just below the meeting ID in the invitation. Here is a video from Zoom that explains meeting join passwords:

– all Zoom meetings will now have the waiting room feature turned on by default. The waiting room allows you, as the meeting host, to determine who to let into your Zoom meeting. Here is a video from Zoom that explains how to use the waiting room

Note that these changes will only impact new meetings that you create. If you wish to update any meetings that you have already created with these new settings, including recurring meetings, you can do that by editing the meeting either on the web or within the application. Note: if you choose to add a password to an existing meeting you will need to resend the invitation so that your attendees will have a link with the password embedded and also be able to see the password should they wish to type it in manually.

Zoom has announced that they are solely focusing on security over the next 90 days so I suspect that we will continue to see additional security features and new settings. We will continue to adopt those changes that help keep your meetings secure and, as always, we will communicate these changes to you.