My PhD defense was #zoombombed yesterday, so here are some suggestions for protecting your @zoom_us meetings. #virtualdefense #phdchat #ScienceTwitter 1/

Background: trolls attempted to disrupt my defense yesterday. The interruptions were harmless at first, but they became increasingly vile and threatened me. It was scary for me and all participants. 2/

Thankfully, my epic response team @jen_mckey and Shannon shut it down after like ~10min of disruption! Here's what we/they did. 3/

First, log in to Zoom and go to Settings and click Meetings. Here there are basic and advanced "In-meeting" settings which control what participants are able to do. I blocked screen sharing, remote control, file sharing, mute all microphones, block re-entry of removed people. 4/

I made my advisor and 2 labmates "co-hosts" of the meeting so that they could share screens, talk, and control the settings of the chat from their computers. If there was trouble, they could be the "response team". 5/

The trolls managed to bypass the microphone and re-entry settings. My response team kept muting them, but it didn't work. When accounts were removed, new ones would come in. We aren't sure if this was one person regenerating accounts, or a concerted troll effort. 6/

My response team then created a waiting room so that they could control who got in. The trolls bypassed this too. 7/

Finally, they closed the Zoom to block entry of any new participants. They found that new accounts were added to the end of the list of participants, so they removed suspicious account names or anyone who tried to unmute. Sorry if you got accidentally booted! 8/

Their account names were red flags - they used my name, "Zoom Admin", or joke names like Hugh Janus or Burt Johnson. 9/

Diligent policing of the participant list and closing the room did the trick, and the rest of the defense went smoothly! 10/

What did we learn? Trolls are tricky little assholes and can bypass a lot of Zoom settings. I really hope @zoom_us can work on this. 11/

The trolls sucked, but over 100 people were able to watch my defense. The overwhelming support was so wonderful given the circumstances. If I could do it all over, I'd take on the trolls again. 12/

Trolls aren't for everyone, so if you don't want to this happen, DON'T share the link publicly. Alternatively, use a platform like @YouTube that'll let folks join but not interrupt. Zoom does offer password protection, but IMO that defeats the purpose of inviting the public. 13/

That's all I can suggest! Please share more #zoombombing advice here for others to read. end/

Some folks have told me that Zoom Webinar is way more secure than Meetings. So if your institution offers this, might be worth trying it out! https://twitter.com/ceri_weber/status/1243907622450970625?s=21 https://twitter.com/ceri_weber/status/1243907622450970625