As people turn to Microsoft Teams to stay connected and to deliver online classes, meetings, and live events, it is recommended that organizers exercise due diligence to mitigate hijacking incidents or unauthorized access.

Teams Meetings

We recommend these best practices to protect your Teams meetings:

• Be prepared – know the meeting options and settings prior to your virtual meeting
• Keep meeting join information private - don’t share on social media or public websites
• Control access – learn to manage the meeting lobby to prevent uninvited guests from attending
• Prevent users from taking control of the meeting
• Limit screen sharing
• Restrict chat to members of your Team

You can visit the Meetings in Teams page for an overview of best practices and detailed tutorials for how to protect your Teams meetings.

Zoom Meetings

You may have heard of Zoom bombing (the unwanted intrusion by an individual into a video conference call, causing disruption). To protect your Zoom Meetings, we recommend the following best practices:

• Avoid sharing meeting links on social media or public outlets
• Avoid using Personal Meetings ID (PMI) to host public events - Your PMI is a persistent meeting room and people can pop in and out all the time
• Manage Screen Sharing - To prevent random people from taking over sharing, restrict sharing to the host
• Manage Participants
  • Lock the meeting - By locking the meeting after the meeting has started, no new participants can join.
  • Remove unwanted or disruptive participants
  • Disable video – Hosts can block unwanted, distracting, or inappropriate gestures on video
  • Mute participants – Hosts can block unwanted, distracting, or inappropriate noise from other participants
• Introduce a Waiting Room – The Waiting Room is a virtual staging area that stops your guests from joining until you’re ready for them.

For more information about protecting your Zoom meetings, visit the Zoom security website.

If you have any questions about protecting your virtual meetings, please contact the IT Support Centre at (613)533-6666 or by filling out the Online Help Form.

If you want more information about Connecting, Collaborating, and Teaching Remotely, check out the IT Services webpage.