July 21, 2022
Google is finally making it easy for users to block unsolicited invitations.
The company’s new “Automatically add invitations” settings now only allow those that were previously accepted via email (RSVP’d), preventing the system from automatically adding all invitations to the default calendar.
“To help keep your Google Calendar free from spam, you can now select an option to display events on your calendar only if they come from a sender you know. If you select this option, you still get email event invitations from unknown senders, but they appear on your calendar only after you accept,” explained the Google Workspace team.
Unsolicited calendar invitations can be used by threat actors to target Google Calendar users. While invitation spam may be harmless to some people, these spam calendar invitations could be used by attackers to redirect targets to phishing landing sites via malicious URLs.
“As before, you can also choose to have all invitations appear on your calendar or only those you’ve accepted—letting you customize the display to best meet your needs. Additionally, admins can set the default reply option for their users in the Google Admin console. Note that end users can indicate their preference in their own Calendar settings,” Google added.
The sources for this piece include an article in BleepingComputer.
