Keep A Distance from Phishing Messages via Google Calendar

Apart from sending phishing messages via email and pop-ups, scammers have found a new route and that is by planting fraud invitation link in Google calendar app.

Who wants to be a prey to spam messages? Obviously, nobody wants to disclose their personal details to any third party. This is the only reason why we avoid clicking any suspicious emails or attachments. But how will we safeguard ourselves when phishing messages are planted in our calendar, especially if the notifications comes our way via Google calendar, the most trusted app.

Thanks to Kaspersky, the famous antivirus firm for finding out the new kind of threat. Every day scammers are finding new ways of phishing attacks and very often they are successful as well. Very recently they have realized that they can reach the victim by planting links on their schedules. They are now taking advantage of calendar settings, leaving no room for doubt in the victim’s mind.

The attackers take advantage of default calendar settings and target users by adding any events automatically and sending them notifications regarding it. The initial ignition occurs with preloaded innocuous texts related to any kind of events and then attaching a phishing link to it with the added catchy line to lure the users for clicking it.
The links are mostly related to fake surveys related to cashback reward or money transfer, where the primary motive of the attackers remains the same. They want their victim to click the link and provide their personal details. Sometimes they are even asking for credit card details.

For sending such fraudulent invitations, the names of the victims are already enlisted beforehand along with that the number of times they will receive the notifications are also set. So, until the victim deletes the invitation or finally clicks it out of curiosity they will keep on receiving the notifications, which gets added automatically along with the fake invitation.

So it is high time that you stay alerted from such messages as it has become pretty common these days. Taking precaution is a wiser decision. To do that click Google calendar settings and visit Event settings then move to Automatically Add Invitations and select the necessary option. Also, make sure to uncheck “show declined events” under “View Options”. This can help you to keep a distance from phishing messages.

One thing you must not forget Google never promotes spreading of scams so even if you come across any never forget to raise this issue to them. They will surely look after the issue.