As more and more people try to take their day to day lives online and “go virtual” in an effort to stay productive while practicing appropriate social distancing, some have fallen prey to a new phenomenon called Zoombombing. Named for the popular online meeting platform Zoom, Zoombombing occurs when uninvited guests break into the meeting and do inappropriate things. And depending on the nature of the meeting and the level of inappropriateness, it can be quite upsetting for participants.

Here at Lionrock, we are virtual by design, not by necessity. In fact, for the last six years, Zoom has been our platform of choice to provide convenient, private and secure counseling for our clients. In the ten years since our founding we’ve learned a lot about what it takes to help hundreds of clients and we’ve learned a lot about virtual safety and security.

In March alone, Lionrock admissions for Substance Use Disorders treatment grew 40 percent and support group attendance tripled. That wouldn’t happen if we couldn’t provide a safe and secure setting.

Lionrock clients are protected from Zoombombers by everything we do to maintain HIPAA-compliance. Zoombombers look for publicly posted meeting links; Lionrock’s therapy session links are never public. They are always protected.

We do publish Lionrock’s hosted support group meetings so that people who want to attend can find them easily. We want to assure all of our meeting participants that we have locked down Zoom to protect any meeting participants from Zoombombing. Here’s what we’ve done and precautions we’re taking:

  • Updated to Zoom’s latest version which addresses known security flaws shared by Zoom. We continue to monitor tech security sites for potential future flaws and hacks.
  • Disabled the features which Zoombombers use to disrupt meetings. 
  • We now require meeting participants to enter a “waiting room” prior to entering the meeting. The meeting host will screen participants individually and let those with good intentions into the meeting.

If you have any concerns about your security and privacy during treatment, please contact us.