Protecting Online Meetings From Disruptions

With online meetings likely to remain an important communication and collaboration tool for businesses of all sizes, it’s important for small business owners to understand the security features of their selected video conferencing platform.

Video conferencing services experienced explosive growth at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that explosion was followed by a series of disruptions and other security breaches.

Fortunately, the services have worked to increase security features and are providing helpful information to help meeting attendees work together successfully while reducing the risk of disruption in the unauthorized access to sensitive information.

Diverse Threats

Security threats for online meetings come in two basic forms: disrupting meetings with offensive contact, and stealing confidential information from live or recorded meetings.

In the disruptive form, hackers use automated tools to search for the online addresses of unsecured meetings, and log on with the intention to interrupt the meeting by shouting rude language as well as displaying offensive content on their screens.

In addition to being annoying, antics like this can also create an unfavorable opinion if your company is meeting with customers or prospects.

This threat was more common at the start of the pandemic, with meeting addresses being shared freely online and password requirements being rare. Although it’s not as common as it was, it’s still important to take appropriate measures (discussed below) to protect the security of your online meetings.

The other, and potentially more serious, threat is a hacker logging onto a meeting without authorization, or an invited guest secretly trying to record your meeting.

Defensive Measures

To help mitigate the risk of your online meetings being disrupted or your important information being compromised, consider the following steps:

• Spend a few moments on your online meeting provider’s website to understand their recommended security procedures and settings. Most online conferencing platforms have detailed tutorials that outline recommended settings to make your meetings safer.
• Create a separate meeting ID and require passwords for your meetings. Over time, as more people receive meeting IDs that you recycle, the risk increases that one of those IDs can be exposed unnecessarily and your meeting can be breached.
• Be careful about how and where you share meeting links. Sending links to expected participants via email, for instance, is safer than posting a link on your website or social media pages.
• Create a virtual “waiting room” so you understand who is coming into the meeting, and only admit people you expect to be there.
• Don’t allow attendees to join the meeting before the host. Enabling this setting bypasses the protection of the waiting room.
• Restrict screen sharing. Since the unauthorized display of offensive content was an early way to disrupt meetings, videoconferencing platforms allow you to restrict screen-sharing only to meeting co-hosts or other authorized users.
• Lock the meeting once everyone shows up. Just like your home or office, locking the virtual door to your meeting is a great way to prevent someone you don’t expect to wander in and to cause problems.

Be Careful With Your Recordings

If you record a video conferencing session to prepare a transcript or other legitimate purposes, be careful about how and where you upload the recording file. It’s fairly easy to find recordings of meetings that people have uploaded to public video services using their conferencing service’s default filename format. This can expose sensitive information unnecessarily.