New scam: Calendar invites hide dangerous login pages

A new wave of calendar phishing scams is emerging, with reports of exponential growth in this threat. These malicious schemes involve sending fake meeting invitations or service renewal prompts directly to users' electronic calendars. The trick lies in how calendar applications, such as Google Calendar, can automatically add invitations without user interaction, bypassing the need to open suspicious emails.

These deceptive calendar entries, appearing alongside legitimate appointments, aim to borrow credibility before luring victims. They often contain links to convincing fake login pages for popular services like Google, Microsoft, or PayPal. The goal is to trick individuals into entering their usernames and passwords, which are then harvested by fraudsters for sale or further exploitation.

Security experts emphasize the difficulty in blocking these attacks, as legitimate platforms like Zoom are sometimes used to send the invitations. This makes them harder for security software and AI blockers to detect. Even if an invitation appears to come from within your own company, users are urged to remain vigilant.

To combat this threat, individuals are advised to disable the automatic acceptance of calendar invitations. Instead, they should manually review and delete any suspicious entries. Declining a fake invite can alert scammers that an email address is active, making it more crucial to simply delete or report such invitations as spam.