7 Tips to Help Secure Your Webinars

Webinars are a valuable way for today’s organizations to connect with potential and existing customers, engage employees through all-hands meetings, and run large-scale events. In order to create a seamless and engaging webinar experience, you need to first make sure you’re providing a controlled and secure environment.

At Zoom, we’ve created our platform — including our Zoom Webinars solution — with security in mind. Our webinar security controls are designed to help hosts and co-hosts manage and safeguard the experience while maximizing the potential of their session.

Here are few key ways you can help secure your webinars: 

• Turn off chat for attendees: To prevent side chatter or unwarranted commentary during your webinar, you can disable the chat feature for all participants. If the host has disabled attendee chat, the host and other panelists can still chat among themselves. You can disable chat in your account settings or during the webinar.

• Control the Q&A: The Q&A feature allows attendees to ask questions during the webinar, and for the panelists, co-hosts, and host to answer them. To help manage the Q&A function from potentially being abused by an attendee, disable “Allow attendees to view” in the Q&A section of your “Webinars” panel in the Zoom web portal. That way, attendees will only be able to view the questions that hosts and panelists have chosen to answer. 

• Remove the anonymous feature: In the Q&A tab in your settings, turn off “Allow anonymous questions” to disable anonymous submissions. By removing this option, participants won’t be able to send questions without providing their name to the host, co-host, and panelists.

• Require a passcode: Webinar hosts can require passcodes for an added layer of security. Passcodes can be enabled in account settings, and attendees will need the passcode to access the webinar.

• Manage your panelists and participants: You can manage both panelists and attendees in your webinar via the host controls:
  • Panelists: Hosts can mute/ask to unmute, put on hold, or remove panelists. You can also promote a panelist to co-host or change their role to attendee.
  • Attendees: Hosts can lower attendees’ raised hands, as well as rename or remove the attendee. They can also promote an attendee to be a panelist, which means they’ll be able to appear on video and audio so other audience members can see and hear them.

• Lock the webinar: Once the intended audience has joined your webinar, you can prevent any new panelists or attendees from joining the session by locking it via the host controls. Once a webinar is locked, no new attendees or panelists will be able to join unless you unlock it.

• Set up authentication for your webinar: Admins can enable authentication profiles to require webinar attendees to be logged into their Zoom account to join a session. You can further limit access to Zoom users whose email address matches a certain domain or prevent users in specific domains from joining meetings or webinars. This feature, which is implemented at the account level, can be useful if you want to restrict your participant list to verified users or users from a certain organization, such as for an internal all-hands. 

Whether you’re connecting with hundreds or thousands of attendees, these security controls can help you take the stage with confidence. With Zoom Webinars enabling memorable experiences in a scalable and secure environment, companies can minimize distractions and keep their audience focused on the content being presented. 

For additional security recommendations, check out our blogs dedicated to security tips for Zoom Meetings and Zoom Events security features.