What is "Zoombombing"?

Zoombombing is when someone interrupts of hijacks a teleconferencing chat. National incidents have occurred in which users have had their meetings interrupted by strangers drawing offensive imagery on screen, sharing inappropriate images, doxxing, or taunting users with hate speech or threats. The following steps will help you protect yourself from Zoombombing and make your meetings more secure.

Sharing Meeting Links

RingCentral Meeting links should only be posted on Google Classroom or shared via school email. Links should not be posted on a school website, Weebly site, social media, or posted publicly to the web.

Use a Waiting Room

A waiting room is a virtual staging area that prevents students from joining your meeting until you, as the host, are ready. You can see who is trying to join your meeting and then admin students one by one, or all at once. If the waiting room is enabled, the option for students to join the meeting before the host arrives is automatically disabled. You can enable this feature when scheduling a meeting, see Faculty: Scheduling a Meeting in RingCentral for more information.

When somebody joins your meeting with waiting rooms enabled, you can select "Admit" or see the entire waiting room.

When you click on your participants list, you can admit all participants, individually admit participants, or remove participants. If you remove a user, they will not be able to rejoin the meeting.

Waiting rooms can also be enabled for all meetings, including "instant meetings". Open the web portal, click on Settings, click on Meetings, and then turn on waiting rooms for all of your meetings. For more information, see the attached in-depth PDF.

Enable Participants Only Joining After You

This option ensures that students cannot join your meeting without you beginning it first. You can enable this feature when scheduling a meeting, see Faculty: Scheduling a Meeting in RingCentral for more information.

Locking a Meeting

Locking a meeting keeps new participants from joining the meeting. This is useful when all of the students in your class have joined a meeting. To lock an ongoing meeting, open the "Manage Participants" panel, then select "More", then choose "Lock Meeting" from the dropdown list.

Disable Screen Sharing

To prevent content from being shared, make sure only the host can share. You can change this setting to allow all participants to share at any time. Make sure that only the host can take over sharing when someone is already sharing.

Remove Unwanted Participants

If you have an unwanted or unfamiliar participant attempt to join your class, navigate to the "Participants" window and hover your mouse over the unwanted person. Click on the "More" box that appears, then select "Remove". Confirm the removal by clicking "Remove" on the pop-up window. The participant will be removed from your class and will not be able to rejoin the current meeting.

More information

• Download the attached in-depth PDF