Illinois REALTORS® wants to help its members to use the Zoom video conference app without interruptions from hackers, especially those using hate speech and porn.

A Chicago Tribune story about such situations, caught the attention today of Illinois REALTORS® President Ed Neaves, the designated managing broker for Berkshire Hathaway Home Services in Bloomington. The article referred to the hacking as “Zoomboming” and offered preventative advice from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Zoom. “I thought it might be a good idea to share some suggestions to our members on how to effectively use this tool and what to avoid,” he said.

The expert ideas included:

• Keep meetings and classrooms private by requiring meeting passwords and using the “Waiting Room” feature to control who participates.
• Send meeting passwords directly to attendees and don’t use social media.
• Use random meeting IDs, so they aren’t shared multiple times. Random IDs are safer than using a “Personal Meeting ID,” according to Zoom.
• To mute other participants and keep control of the screen, hosts should select the “Only Host” screensharing setting.
• To prevent uninvited guests from joining a meeting, hosts should select “Participants” in the bottom of a Zoom window and then select “Lock Meeting.”
• To remove participants from meetings, hosts can hover over the names of attendees in the Participants menu and choose the “Remove” option. Attendees who are removed will not be allowed back in, according to Zoom’s website.
• Use the most recent version of Zoom’s software, which includes default passwords and has disabled the ability of users to scan for meetings to join, according to the FBI.

Read the full article, “Zoom video meetings are being interrupted by hackers using hate speech and showing porn. It’s called ‘Zoombombing.’ Here’s how to prevent it.”