Easy Ways to Protect Our Families From Online Hackers
Isn’t technology great?
In the midst of a pandemic, my family “attended” Divine Liturgy at our parish in California, and then caught the end of a sermon my brother gave at his parish in Arizona. The possibilities for worship are pretty awesome. The coffee hour in my kitchen? A little less awesome. But technology couldn’t really fix that anyway.
As a faith-based nonprofit organization that collaborates with folks from all over the world, our team uses Zoom every single day. We actually have for years. So far, we’ve never had a problem.
Today, though, our team knows we have to be careful. Very quickly we are learning that the same tech that is making so much possible for our communities, is presenting some serious downsides as well.
Enter Zoom-bombers.
One of the biggest threats facing our virtual gatherings is the appearance of online trolls. These guys are basically hackers that intentionally interrupt online meetings and what’s heartbreaking, is that they are especially interested in disrupting schools and places of worship. Essentially, they hack into your meeting or digital congregation and perform all sorts of malintented activities. Some insert pornographic images and videos. Some spew hate speech. Some fling threats. And all of them do it in the name of causing chaos. Our family experienced this first hand when my four kids and I logged onto a Zoom conference with our church camping staff and almost 100 other families this week. As we gathered to learn about the cancelation of the camping program due to the Coronavirus, we got an earful of oh-so-much other stuff. And my seven-year-old heard it all.
Since Faithtree knows the pastors, lay leaders and people we serve are utilizing tech like never before, we enlisted the help of Fr. Deacon Thom Crowe, an Orthodox deacon at St. Anthony Antiochian Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He’s also a developer marketing manager and has experience in cybersecurity. He offered our team some insight and solutions to keep our tribe safer online.
We thought you and your community would benefit from hearing his insight too.
Fr. Deacon Thom, take it away!
Fr. Deacon Thom Crowe:
Zoom.us is a great way to keep our parishes connected during this time, but Zoom has some security flaws that we've seen exploited, leading to meetings with clergy, parishioners, and even our young ones getting bombarded with hate speech, profanity, and pornographic images.
The good news is there are ways we can keep our parishioners and young people safe.
1. Don't share your Zoom link publically.
Make sure that the link you're using to open a Zoom room is only shared with those who are invited. Don't post links on your website or social media. Send the link to join the meeting in an email or private group where you know who is being invited. For social media and your parish website, offer a way for people to reach you directly to get the link. You can ask that they provide an email, or ask people to message you, or you can put up a request form.
2. Password protect your Zoom room.
Never publicly post your link. This will help avoid most issues because the majority of those people exploiting Zoom right now are finding links and using those. However, there are some people and bots just trying random room numbers. To prevent this, add a password to your room and share that with only those you'd like to participate in the call. To add a password, when you're scheduling your call, click the “Require meeting password” option and a password will automatically be generated as you can see below.
3. Enable a waiting room
If enabled on your account, the waiting room feature allows you to determine who joins your Zoom room and who doesn’t. Interested participants must give you their name and enter a waiting room. This lets you decide to allow them into the conversation or alternatively, gives you the ability to reject them. Not all Zoom accounts have this feature enabled. To find out if you have this option enabled, you may have to ask your Zoom account administrator to enable it for you. Here’s how to do that: Go to Account Management in Account Settings (If you're not an administrator of your account, your account administrator will need to do this for you). Navigate to the Waiting Room option on the Meeting tab and verify it's enabled, as shown below.
As people enter your room, you'll have the option to admit them entry one-by-one or you can admit all to let everyone waiting in.
4. Consider other options
If you don't have a Zoom Pro account and need to meet with more than two people for longer than 40 minutes, you can use the free option Meet Jitsi, which has, thus far, not experienced the problems Zoom has. The free version of Jitsi caps at 75 attendees, and the paid version allows up to 200. Simply go to meet.jit.si and enter a name for the room you want to open. This will become the ongoing link you use to invite your attendees.
In my example below, I opened DeaconThomsRoom, and could invite people to https://meet.jit.si/DeaconThomsRoom.
Once in the room, click the (i) button and set a password. This keeps uninvited people from joining. When you leave, the room resets, so every time you use this room, you'll have to set the password again.
