Spam in my Calendar?

Have you had any odd meetings in your Outlook or Google calendars lately? I’ve been monitoring an interesting spamming technique over the past few weeks where they are sending automatically accepted meeting requests (if you allow that) to your calendar.

The spam is originating from Gmail accounts but the Google and Outlook calendar functions are compatible so the meeting request goes straight into your calendar and you probably won’t notice it until you get a reminder at the spammers chosen time.

All the samples I’ve seen so far are Nigerian Scams which is interesting in itself as the Nigerian scammers have traditionally been less advanced in terms of coming up with new tricks.

This tactic adds a further nuisance factor for the recipients of this spam as it sets your time as “Busy”. Sure, you can turn off automatic acceptance of meeting requests via the Calendar options in Outlook and in Google Calendar but that feature is provided for a reason so why should the spammers stop us using it? This spam campaign has been low volume and targeted as is the nature of the Nigerian Scam email but there’s been alot of talk in the last few months about Gmails captcha being broken so it wouldn’t suprise me if the botnet spammers pick it up pretty soon!

Tags: google, outlook, scam, spam