Zoombombing, it’s what all the cool kids are doing these days!

Unless you’re seriously living under a rock, you know that the world has gone a bit crazy, and we’re all on lockdown, trying to keep as far away from everyone else as we can.  This has lead to a significant uptick in remote working, people who are now working from home instead of from an office.

This increase in remote working has led to a significant uptick in use of video conferencing tools, with Zoom seeming to be a strong favourite.

These aren’t just being used for private meetings, in fact corporate tools like Skype for Business and Teams are typically used for those.  Where Zoom is really coming into it’s own is with the public meetings, where you can share the link and anyone can join.  These are being used for “open house” or “watercooler” meetings.

These meetings are designed to be more casual, anyone in the company can stop by for a chat at any time, drop in and out, no commitment or expectation.  They’re to replace those random conversations that get struck up around the office when people happen across each other, something which doesn’t happen much when you’re sat along in your home office.

Unfortunately, with the rise of these meetings, so has the rise of people interrupting these meetings!  People are dropping in other people’s meetings, presumably either by the link being inadvertently shared a little to liberally, or people deliberately attempting to guess (or bruteforce) random meeting IDs.

Some of these have even turned a rather nasty, with racist abuse or people dropping in and then showing porn to the others in the meeting.  Suffice to say, you should be very careful that you review the privacy settings on these meetings, and keep the meeting ID secret to the people you want to turn up.