Zoombombing 

Zoombombing is a new form of trolling in which a participant uses Zoom’s screensharing feature to interrupt and disrupt meetings and classes. Uninvited attendees join random Zoom sessions to cause mischief and potentially to listen in on meetings to gain sensitive information.

Tips to Prevent Zoombombing

• Avoid hosting large meetings or ‘public’ events using your Personal Meeting ID (PMI). Instead, Zoom suggests using   random meeting IDs for your large meetings.
• Lock your meeting .   You can lock a Zoom meeting once it has started and all your expected participants have joined.
• Require a password   to join your meeting.
• When using Zoom for classes, provide the link in TITANium. To learn more on how to set up Zoom in TITANium, please click   here.
• If you find yourself with a disruptive participant in your meeting, you can remove them. On the Zoom control panel, click on “Participants”, then select “More”, “Remove” the participant.
  
  

Message from the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center^®

On March 30, 2020, the FBI released an article, warning users of teleconferencing sessions being hijacked (also being referred to as “Zoombombing”) all over the nation. The FBI has received multiple reports of conferences being disrupted by pornographic and/or hate images and threatening language. In the wake of reports of this activity being reported to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaints Center (IC3), they have published the following recommendations:

• Do not make meetings or classrooms public. In Zoom, there are two options to make a meeting private: require a meeting password or use the waiting room feature and control the admittance of guests.
• Do not share a link to a teleconference or classroom on an unrestricted publicly available social media post. Provide the link directly to specific people.
• Manage screensharing options. In Zoom, change screensharing to “Host Only.”
• Ensure users are using the updated version of remote access/meeting applications. In January 2020, Zoom updated their software. In their security update, the teleconference software provider added passwords by default for meetings and disabled the ability to randomly scan for meetings to join.
• Lastly, ensure that your organization’s telework policy or guide addresses requirements for physical and information security.

Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a notice today about this activity and added the following recommendations, as this issue is not specific to Zoom, but rather applies to all video teleconferencing (VTC) software:

• Consider security requirements when selecting vendors. For example, if end-to-end encryption is necessary, does the vendor offer it?
• Ensure VTC software is up to date.

 

References:

FBI, US-CERT, Zoom

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