10 Ways to Ensure Your Virtual Meetings Remain Secure
Recent world events have brought significant changes to the workflow of nearly every business across every industry. Even businesses that weathered the first economic impact have needed to adapt their business model to all-new safety precautions. One of the single most common results of this is remote employees and the need for virtual meetings.
A virtual meeting is, most often, a group video call hosted by the team leader. Each person connects to the call with a webcam or their laptop camera and from there, you can hold all the same discussions (and give most of the same presentations) as if you were sharing a meeting room. You might say the biggest difference is not being in the room together but from a business standpoint, the biggest difference is security.
Zoom-bombing has become a widespread problem, not just limited to Zoom virtual meetings. Hackers have discovered that that can wreak havoc on the newly-remote business world by invading the virtual meetings of work groups all over the world. These invasions range from corporate espionage to juvenile disruption with everything in between. Today, we’re here to highlight how to keep your virtual meetings secure from intrusions of any unwelcome sort.
1) Choose a Secure Virtual Meeting Platform
Start with a meeting platform you can trust. One of the early mistakes of the post-COVID remote workforce was using consumer-grade software for business purposes. Businesses both put more stress on a system and require more rigorous security, as Zoom quickly learned. If your business has a SaaS or otherwise internal virtual meeting platform, that will likely offer greater security than choosing a video app to meet-up on with the team.
If you choose a consumer product, do the research and confirm that it has security protection and a good security response team in case you run into problems that need quick host reactions.
2) Require a Password to Enter the Meeting
The single most useful thing you can do to keep hackers out is to require a password for all joining members of the meeting. Zoom meetings, for example, can only be auto-hacked by a malicious program if they are completely password free. Even a password of “1234” is more secure than no password at all.
Realistically, we strongly suggest choosing a shared team password that only the internal team is aware of. Write an acronym that everyone can remember and turn it into a team inside-joke and your meeting password. This way, your team can easily remember the password for every meeting (no tedious copy-paste) and you won’t have to re-share the password many times, which reduces security.
3) Watch for Uninvited Guests and Duplicate Members
Know how to spot if your meeting is being bombed. Hackers can appear in a number of ways, some disguised and some not. Watch for uninvited guests who appear in the attendant-list but don’t have a camera image. Watch for a new number on the attendant list with a seemingly invisible ” ” username. Also keep an eye out for duplication, when one of your meeting members suddenly has two entries and two cameras in the meeting. Hackers will use clipped images, video, or even digitally doubled video to disguise themselves as glitching legitimate attendants. If this occurs, boot and ban the extra account and make sure your meeting is better secured.
4) Help Remote Employees Secure Their Home Networks
When two people connect, the connection can be hacked from either direction. When many people connect from personal devices, this increases the vectors for a hacker to attack through using an infected device or connection. To reduce the risk of your virtual meetings (and other online work product) being hacked, walk your team through securing their computers and their home networks.
Securing each employee’s home network should include configuration settings, a firewall properly configured, virus scanning and cleaning software, and some network monitoring tools notice the basic red-flags.
5) Use Secure File-Sharing and Chat Features
Hackers don’t need to invade your call to steal from your virtual meetings. The documents, presentations, and text chat box are all separate data types that could be accessed through a hacked connection or platform. Consider the work-product documents you share and what you discuss via text during virtual meetings. Make sure your platform is secure or, if your video platform isn’t secure, use a secure business document management platform to share documents instead of presenting sensitive information through the call. You can also specifically choose to share a secured chat channel simultaneously with the call if you need to type secure information in an unsecured meeting.
6) Do Not Publicly Share Meeting Links
Meeting links are how hackers find your meeting to attack it. Posting your meeting links openly on Facebook or the group social media conversation is a good way to get uninvited guests. So keep your meeting links completely private or, better yet, only available to employees who are already logged in and authorized.
For sharing links through semi-public channels, there are many tricks you can use. You can post links and passwords in a shared document, making sure the document is shared securely. If you share a meeting link through social media, use private message and chat channels instead of a public post or even a post in a shared group.
For open meetings where you want to attract new attendees, use a simple gated system to log in. If attendance should be authorized, require an account. Or offer account-free access without the ability to talk, chat, or share files. Find ways to limit the viewers of your public links to members of groups instead of the broad public.
7) Close All (Secure) Meetings – Don’t Run Indefinitely
Some teams enjoy an open flow of communication. It’s nice to have a chat channel open all day, making it easy to swap ideas and generally share a work environment across the distance. If the open chat channel is limited to casual conversations and non-secure information, this is a safe and pleasant approach.
However, if your meetings need to be secure, don’t let them run indefinitely. Have set start and end times and have everyone log off so the meeting room can be closed between meetings. This prevents hackers from gaining access during hours of unmonitored time in the room. It also prevents housemates and family members from gaining access to the chatroom along with any secure data therein.
8) Use a Waiting Room Approval System
A waiting room, sometimes called a green room, is a way to filter attendees of a virtual meeting. This method is especially useful for open meetings where not all the attendees are known and invited by name. The green room is a temporary waiting-area where those who have logged in can wait to be approved by the meeting host or a deputized moderator. The green room allows the host or mod to check on attendees. You can verify that they are fully dressed, give a thumbs-up when asked, and can speak or type respectfully before being allowed to enter the room.
A waiting room approach adds a layer of complexity to entering your meeting that few anonymous hackers will be willing to approach. It’s also a great tool for ensuring each participant is ready to join. You can help everyone check their cameras, test sound levels, and fix any errors that would have occurred in the first few minutes.
9) Don’t Click on Unexpected Chat Links
One of the things that hackers can gain from invading private meetings is victims for malware exposure. Most video meetings include a chatbox so that non-video information is more easily transmitted. The chatbox is handy for people without sound, those with a malfunctioning camera, and for clarifying when conversation is not sufficient. The chatbox is also often used to share documents and links quickly when referenced during the meeting.
This creates an environment of people automatically clicking links in the box, tempting place for hackers. Increase your box-clicking discipline and put together protocol used by the team. Make sure that each link your team clicks is shared by a known team member and intended to be sent. Watch out for hackers who log in with names similar to team-members just to post a malicious link.
10) Combine Virtual Meetings with a Secure Tech Stack
The final step is to build your virtual meeting solution into a secure tech stack. Security on the remote-end for employees and a good no-gaps system for secure data and communications to work with. Businesses are now honing their remote-team stack to ensure that any sensitive data is contained from end-to-end of the cloud pipeline out to every employee.
Businesses building a new remote workflow may have started with a minimum infrastructure, but the time for improvisation is over. Many businesses are transitioning to a full-stack remote model where employees can much more safely access, use, and share secure business data between each other without the risk of hacker intrusion.
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Protecting your virtual meetings is essential for modern post-COVID business models. We can help you find or build the right stack for your employees along with a routine to ensure daily virtual meeting security. Contact us today to consult on your remote team infrastructure plans.
