
Google now makes it easy to block unwanted calendar invitations, commonly used by threat actors in phishing and malicious campaigns, from being added to your Google Calendar.
This was achieved by improving the “Automatically add invitations” setting which now allows you to choose between having invitations automatically added to your calendar or only having them added if you have responded (RSVP’d) to the email event invitation.
This feature will be OFF by default and can be turned on by the user by going to Open Google Calendar > Go to settings > Scroll to event settings > Add invitations to my calendar.
The new feature started gradually rolling out at a Rapid Release pace to Google Workspace customers, G Suite Basic and Business customers, and users with personal Google Accounts.
Google has been working on a solution to block spammers from automatically spamming Google Calendar users with malicious invitations. This seemed to be an innocuous problem, some of these spam events were redirecting potential victims to phishing landing pages via malicious URLs. The end goal of these attacks is to harvest the targets’ credentials or infect them with malware via malicious sites.
Google Calendar is available on all desktop platforms as a web app and for mobile platforms via Android with 1,000,000,000 times downloaded and iOS mobile apps, the spammers can potentially reach an enormous number of potential victims.