Zoom announced today a couple of new features meant to improve the security of its video conferences. The latest changes will make it more difficult for intruders to disrupt a Zoom conference and allow hosts to suspend participant activities.
The At-Risk Meeting Notifier system is a new feature that runs internally and continuously scans posts on social media and other websites to check for Zoom meeting links that have been publicly shared. Likewise, Zoom will then alert meeting organizers about the risk of disruption to their online meetings through Zoombombing attacks.The alert also contains recommended practices for mitigating risks such as "deleting the vulnerable meeting and creating a new one with a new meeting ID, enabling security settings, or using another Zoom solution like Zoom Video Webinars or OnZoom."
Another new feature is the ability for hosts or co-hosts to pause a meeting in order to report and remove a participant. This can be done by clicking “Suspend Participant Activities”, which will then halt all meeting activities and Breakout Rooms.
The hosts or co-host can already report a user by clicking the security badge at the top left corner. Now, this option is available to meeting participants as well. The report will then be forwarded to Zoom’s Trust and Safety team and hosts can resume the meeting by individually turning on specific features for the conference.
This capability is turned on by default for free and premium Zoom users. It's available on Zoom desktop clients for Windows, macOS, and Linux as well as its mobile apps. Later this year, Zoom will roll out the feature to its web client and virtual desktop infrastructure.
