When Online Events Become Targets: What We Learned, and What Must Change

Online events across the research, education and non-profit communities are being deliberately disrupted. This is what happened to us, what we have learned since, and what every organiser can do about it.

At Fast Track Impact, we train researchers around the world, much of it through live online sessions. Recently, one of our open online Zoom sessions was deliberately disrupted. A group of people joined through our registration link, copied the names of genuine attendees, and broadcast sexually explicit video to everyone present. We ended the session, but not before attendees had seen material no one should be exposed to. We are deeply sorry to everyone who was there.

The people behind these attacks register like any other participant and wait among genuine attendees. In our case, they arrived early, sat in the waiting room alongside around 80 people, and then used participant permissions to take over the screen. We have reviewed exactly how it happened and closed those gaps.

We have since heard that other organisations have been through the same thing. We have also found examples on YouTube where "content creators" recorded their disruptions and posted them as "entertainment", which attracts views and encourages others to copy it.

Our position is that this is organised harassment, not a glitch or a lapse by any one organiser. The people behind it act deliberately. They join in groups under fake or copied names and exploit any permission left open, including screen sharing, unmuting, cameras, chat and renaming. Attendees, including students and members of the public, are left shocked and distressed.

We are changing how we run our online events, and are sharing what we learned from this terrible experience so that other organisers can take steps before it happens.

Five steps organisers can take today:

1. Treat meeting link like an office key. Do not post it on public social media. Free registration on its own filters nobody out. Where your platform allows it, register people through the platform so each person gets a personal join link. Anyone without a link that has been passed on can be traced. Use new links for every event.
2. Run open events in "webinar" modes. Whatever platform you use, set up public sessions so attendees can watch and type questions, and nothing more. That means screen sharing for hosts only, microphones muted with no self-unmuting, participant cameras off, renaming off, annotation off, and chat limited to the hosts.
3. Check the waiting room. A waiting room or lobby only helps if someone screens it. Check names against your registrations rather than admitting everyone at once, be wary of anyone who arrives long before the start, and lock the event once everyone expected has arrived.
4. Assign a co-host familiar with the security settings. One person presents; another watches who joins and is ready to act.
5. Know the emergency buttons. Many meeting platforms have a control that stops all participant sharing, audio, video and chat at once. On Zoom, it is called 'Suspend Participant Activities'. Find yours and practise using it.

If it happens, the challenge is to act fast to suspend activity, lock the meeting, remove and report the attackers to the platform. Then look after attendees and report the incident to the video platform.

Organisers can and must protect their events, but we cannot solve this alone. The video platforms we use to host meetings, and the companies whose platforms spread recordings of these attacks, both play a part. We call on them to act.

Video-sharing and social media platforms must stop treating these attacks as entertainment. We found these recordings on YouTube, and the same applies to any platform that hosts user video, including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X and Twitch. A recording of strangers being shown explicit or hateful material without their consent is harassment, and so is the act it records. We call on these platforms to:

• remove recordings of meeting disruptions under their existing harassment policies, rather than treating them as pranks;
• stop recommending, promoting or paying creators for this content;
• act against channels and accounts that repeatedly post it;
• act against groups and forums where meeting links are traded to organise attacks.

If you come across one of these videos, report it; don't watch or share it. Each view rewards the people who made it.

Meeting platforms must make safety the default. Zoom is the platform we used, and the same applies to Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Webex and every other provider. Organisers should not need to know which settings to switch off to stop a stranger taking over their screen. We call on these providers to:

• make safe settings the default for any event open to the public: screen sharing for hosts only, no self-renaming, participants muted with cameras off on entry;
• require organisers to choose, with a clear warning, before opening these permissions;
• offer a personal join link for each registrant as standard;
• warn hosts about suspicious patterns, such as people joining seconds after a room opens.

Online events have made research and learning more accessible to people who may not be able to attend in person. Keeping these spaces safe is a shared responsibility. If you know someone in your network who hosts online sessions, please feel free to share this message to help raise awareness.