Zoom introduces new security features to keep online disruptors, trolls at bay

With the pandemic forcing people to work from home, online video conferencing apps like Zoom have seen a great reception this year. Although many people use the app for day to day meetings, security concerns like meeting disruptions by trolls continue to bother users. Now the popular app has added a few security enhancements to make the process more secure. Zoom will be allowing users to remove and report disruptive meeting participants from a meeting via two new features, wrote Matt Nagel, the Security and Privacy PR Lead at Zoom, in a blog post recently.

Along with this, an internal tool has been incorporated “to help prevent meeting disruptions before they happen”.

As part of the new enhancements, hosts and co-hosts will be able to pause an ongoing meeting and remove a particular participant. The hosts and co-hosts will be asked by Zoom whether they wish to report a certain user from their meeting, share any details, and optionally include a screenshot. Once the details have been entered, hosts can click on ‘Submit’ and the changes will be reflected in the application immediately. Zoom’s Trust & Safety team will be notified about the issue and the firm will send the hosts and co-hosts an email after the meeting to gather more information.

“By clicking “Suspend Participant Activities,” all video, audio, in-meeting chat, annotation, screen sharing, and recording during that time will stop, and Breakout Rooms will end,” added the post. This feature is enabled by default for all free and paid Zoom users.

Participants of meetings will be able to report any disruptive member by going to the Zoom client by clicking the top-left Security badge. Hosts were already capable of doing that. Both of these features can be found in the Security icon in the app. The blog also spoke about an At-Risk Meeting Notifier that has been in place since this Fall, according to Zoom. the tool scans public social media posts and other websites for publicly shared Zoom Meeting links. Once it finds a link in the high-risk zone of getting disrupted, it “alerts the account owner by email and provides advice on what to do”.