Zoom bomber communities and how they attacked my event

Tweet a Zoom link and you’ll get a hostile guest within 30 seconds

Genitalia was scribbled on my shared screen within the first minute of an event about building products. At one point, a participant began twerking, another undressed, and a few others pasted hundreds of hateful lines in the chat. One Zoom bomber loudly voiced a fake apology. Some of these disruptions were delayed tens of minutes into the event by sleeper cells of sorts. During each new form of disruption, we scrambled to disable another Zoom feature, and remove more attendees.

Our group of event organizers were embarrassed, shaken and perplexed. The trolls won this round. In contrast, I visited a professional Zoom with 200 strangers a week earlier in which all attendees could unmute freely, yet there was no foul play. So I was confused as to how my meeting got so bad so fast. Listing the ways in which the attackers could have found the Zoom link, one was easy to test — Twitter.

Out of curiosity, I tweeted a Zoom link

30 seconds after this tweet, a troll joined my, never before mentioned, Zoom meeting. Somehow the troll instantly discovered the link and joined. I deleted my tweet. When I asked for how he got the invite to the Zoom, he…