Zoombombing is a form of cyberattack that involves an external party hijacking a Zoom teleconference chat session. User may experience the attacker drawing, sharing files, or displaying video of offensive imagery. Content may include hate speech and/or threats. DePaul Faculty, Staff, and Students are encouraged to follow the tips below to reduce the occurrence and address an active situation if necessary. Helpful video tutorials and an incident report form are listed below.
Official Zoom Update March 31, 2020 - Best Practices for Securing your Virtual Classroom
- Keep the link private: Don't share your Zoom meeting link publicly. To share it with your students, email it to them or post it in D2L.
- Restrict meeting attendees in the meeting settings:
Note: Be sure to ask your students to set up their Zoom Pro accounts before enabling this setting. Guests without a Zoom Pro (paid) account will not be able to join. See instructions below.
Note: For all of these options, give students a little extra time to complete the steps to access your room. For the waiting room, you'll need to manually admit all students.
- Disable screen sharing for others (only host): Confirm that screen sharing is disabled for all but the host at the start of the meeting. You can change this later if you want students to share their screens.
- Provide full names: Ask students to provide their full names when joining. Students can rename themselves by placing their cursors over their video panels, clicking the "..." button, and clicking Rename. You can also rename students as the host.
- Remove attendee if necessary: If someone disrupts the class, you can remove them. Place your mouse over their name in the Participants panel, click More, then click Remove. Learn more about managing participants here.
- In case of Zoom Bombing... If your meeting is "bombed," you can delete that meeting link in your Zoom account to inactivate it. Set up a new meeting link to share with your students.
Please see the "Securing your Zoom Meetings" video for a review of the Zoom meeting settings listed below.
Please see the "Responding to Disruptive Zoom Participants" video to see your options for addressing issues that arise during a Zoom meeting.
If you are a faculty or staff member leading a Zoom meeting, and you experience a disruption, please use this Incident Report Form to report the issue.