ITS Response to Zoom Security and Privacy Concerns

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Published | April 15, 2020

Dear W&L Community: 

ITS has been tracking Zoom security and privacy policy concerns, heavily covered by the media over the past several weeks.  We’ve delivered ongoing updates to the ITS News site of our opinion regarding risk, best practice tips, and listing Zoom’s official response and actions to the reported concerns. Yesterday (4-14-20) we participated in a call with higher ed CIO’s and CISO’s from across the country to hear directly from Zoom’s leadership on the issues.  We will continue to post updates as they become available. 

W&L Zoom users are understandably very concerned about privacy and security.  As such, we felt it was important to orient the community to our continuing updates. Assuming proper configuration, hygiene, and general computing best practices, we continue to believe there is no reason to stop using Zoom at this time.

Related posts by ITS and Zoom: 

Update your Zoom client frequently! 

  • You will be prompted to update within 24 hours of any release. Do not put off updating. 
  • You can check for updates at any time by clicking on your profile picture (top right) or the Zoom window, then selecting “Check for Updates.”  
  • When attempting to update, if you are prompted for a login from a W&L owned laptop, please contact the Help Desk (540/458-4357, help@wlu.edu).  ITS will correct the issue to ensure you won’t be prompted in the future. 

Thank you,
David Saacke (CIO)
Dean Tallman (CISO)

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What’s New at Zoom – Week of April 13th

Configure meeting and webinar password requirements

  • Account owners and admins can now configure minimum meeting password requirements, including a minimum length, requiring letters, numbers, special characters, or only allowing numeric passwords. Past meetings scheduled with passwords will not be impacted. 

Meeting IDs up to 11 digits in length

  • One-time random meetings IDs for newly scheduled meetings and webinars can now be up to 11 digits long. Your Personal Meeting ID (PMI) will remain the same and already scheduled meetings will not be impacted. 

Password for Cloud Recordings 

  • We updated password guidelines for hosts when sharing their cloud recordings for meetings and webinars.  Default will now be ON, and require a complex password to access a shared recording. Existing shared recordings will not be impacted. 

Re-enable Third-party File Sharing

  • We have restored the functionality to share files from third-party platforms, such as Dropbox or OneDrive if configured for their Zoom account, for users on version 4.6.11.

Performance Tuning for Dashboard Data

  • Fixed performance issues related to missing data and delay on dashboard and reporting. We will continue to make improvements to this area. 

App Version

  • App version is accurately reflected in all areas. 

Message Preview Control (Only Applicable to Zoom Chat Users)

  • Users can enable or disable a setting to show a message preview for chat messages.

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