A man allegedly hacked into a Florida classroom Zoom meeting and exposed himself, according to the local school district.
The Orange County, Florida, School District said the incident is being handled by local law enforcement and school personnel.
Teachers are being urged to only use video conferencing platforms.
Hacking known as “Zoombombing” is becoming more popular, as the coronavirus pandemic has locked down much of the U.S. More schools and businesses are using the platform to host online, face-to-face meetings.
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Insidehighered.com reported several online classes have been taken over by Zoom bombers, who post comments “not on topic. They were vulgar, racist, misogynistic toilet humor. I would barely even call it humor,” one professor said. These anonymous users also have posted pornography during the classes.
As students at the University of Tennessee were participating in a virtual “Milkshake Monday,” an anonymous person jumped into the Zoom gathering and began berating everyone with racist rants.
“Zoom bombing has unfortunately become an issue at institutions across the country, and this is at least the second instance at UT Knoxville since we’ve moved online,” Chancellor Donde Plowman posted on the university’s website.
There are steps that can be taken to prevent it:
Instead of using the personal meeting ID Zoom assigns when you create an account, pcmag.com recommends you instead generate a unique code.
“Here’s why,” pcmag.com writes. “Once you put your PMI into the world, people can use it to try and jump in on your Zoom calls at any time.”
By creating a waiting room, the host and/or co-hosts can control who joins a meeting. The “waiting room” option can be found under account settings. Once enabled, the host can either put everyone in the waiting room or “guest participants only,” which adds people on different Zoom accounts or who are not logged into the waiting room.
Business Insider has step-by-step instructions for setting up a waiting room.
The Verge also recommends the meeting host disable the screen-sharing feature.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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