“Apple is finally turning its attention to the growing threat of iCloud Calendar spam, the insidious issue that allows spammers to bypass the usual defenses by exploiting a design flaw in Apple’s cloud Calendar invitation,” Jim Tanous reports for The Mac Observer.
“The issue is not only the spam — comprised primarily of Asian retailers pushing counterfeit products — popping up unsolicited on users’ iDevices and Macs,” Tanous reports, “it’s the risk of exposing recipients to further attacks by confirming the authenticity of their iCloud accounts.”
“While not new, a surge in Calendar spam has hit users in recent weeks,” Tanous reports, “prompting Apple to issue a statement by way of iMore‘s Rene Ritchie.”
https://twitter.com/reneritchie/status/804081476904042496
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Until Apple figures this out, here’s how to kill Apple Calendar invite spam.
There are two other issues Apple needs to address. One is getting spam from vendors whose apps are installed. I had to uninstall Walmart and a few others who were annoying the hell out of me with their alerts and notices etc. Uncalled for. I’ll buy from vendors that do not intrude on my life. The other is that allerts and noticifications intrude and block the view of important information when using maps to navigate, creating a distraction when driving. Apple should allow blocking ALL such notifications when using maps to navigate; and/or under the noticiations settings have a blanket way to turn off all notifications (perhaps except for emergency alerts and similar) with a single centrallzied toggle.
There’s a third issue: that declining/deleting a calendar event automatically sends a declined notification to the sender, which in this case just confirms the account is in use.
Comcast Xfinity’s newest, hybrid cable modem router also installs a secret hot spot using each customer’s bandwidth. This then creates a connection — and intrusive, iPhone WiFi popup — for every Comcast subscriber’s similarly-configured, WiFi hotspot you pass while driving down the street. Each one has to be manually dismissed while driving — even if you have WiFi’s “Ask to Join Networks” checked or unchecked. Maddening! This appears to be the cable company’s lame plan to appear to compete with AT&T’s real, nationwide network of thousands of WiFi hotspots.
@HD Boy
It keeps doing that because it has xfinity on the list of known networks. Click on the information icon next to xfinity in Settings | WiFi and select “Forget this Network”. That will stop the unsolicited pop-ups.
The change that MDN linked to (and many other sites claim to be a fix) did not work for me. When I changed that iCloud preference, I stopped receiving Calendar invitations in any form, including email. That obviously is too extreme a “fix”, so I rolled it back to normal and am hoping more Ray-Ban sales events don’t land in my Calendar, before Apple fixes this. It was idiotic of them to import all invitations by default.
Back before Apple started dumbing down Mac OS X, Apple Mail offered users the option to ‘bounce” spam so you could get rid of it without the sender knowing there was a live address that received it. Some Clown in Cupertino signed off on dropping it or hiding it behind some cryptic keystroke combination unknown to users. Seems like a Bounce option for calendar spam would be a good idea for Apple to include in The calendar app.
I’m guessing the Clown in question is a close relative of the Clown who decided we should rent our music- something Real Networks and Microsoft both tried long ago.
* Just remember to NOT ‘Decline’ or ‘Approve’ Calendar spam. All you’re really doing is making certain you’re on future spam-it lists.
:-Q*****
Follow MDN’s link above for deleting the spam rat attack or read the couple of articles I wrote about working around this mess, posted over at my Mac-Security blog. [Click my avatar for the link to get there].
Might not be enough. I can’t test this now, but IIRC even deleting an invitation counts as a decline and sends a response. Calendar might warn you that deleting it will notify the sender, but with no way to actually disable that notification. So you’re just stuck with it sitting there forever, unless you want your delete/decline to notify the sender.
… And excellent reason to read the link MDN provided above or visit my Mac-Security blog for the workarounds that allow you to either:
(A) Delete the Calendar spam without ‘Decline’-ing.
OR
(B) Stop ALL Calendar invitations from being sent to your Calendar app, diverting them instead to your email program where they are forced through your spam filter instead.
Neither solution above is perfect. (A) is an annoying workaround every time you receive Calendar spam. (B) is one-time fix. But it means you’ll never be able to receive legitimate Calendar invitations. You’ll instead have to watch your email for invitations, at which point you have to ‘Accept’ them to have them show up in your Calendar.
Get rid of it, let the end user enter the Cal event themselves, spending 30 seconds to enter the info is worth the security.