Spam Calendar Invites

This is my concern also. Why is this not patched yet? This is an obvious route in and I'm sure I wasn't the only person to first decline one such event before learning what a stupid mistake that was. Why on earth would I want random invites from unknown senders anyway?? Just give us the option to limit it to known contacts, or at least a way to mark an event spam without notifying the sender so that Apple can ban them.

I just got this exact same message. I was about to delete it, but it said it would notify the sender, so I stopped. I read online that you can move it to a "junk" calendar and delete the entire "junk" calendar. I tested that with my wife, but she did get a declined notice when I deleted the "junk" calendar entry. I'm stuck with the calendar entry at this point. Not sure how to proceed to remove it.

Thanks for your input. I am yet to find a solution so for now this calendar invite is pending. I have two factor authentication on, so I'm not too worried. I'm just wondering if they have got hold of my iCloud email address somehow through a website leak elsewhere. Even so, Apple should have a solution to prevent this.

There is a worrying legal development behind all of this chance spam.

Essentially, any action to decline the invitation reveals to the sender that you have an active Apple email address. Therefore this is a confirmation by Apple to reveal personal information, which is actually a breach of the Data Protection Act of law in the U.K. Essentially Apple are breaking the law. To confirm, I have not revealed my email address to anyone to instigate this scam. If you check my post below you can see that several random attempts were made to guess my iCloud email in the calendar invitation. However, my email will only be confirmed should I choose to accept or decline the invitation. Thus, the onus lies upon Apple should I Decline the invitation.

Sorry if I repeat something, I did not read all the thread. It is too long.

I think the solution to this loophole could be relatively simple.

Calendar should have the option to get invitations from a subset of the address book only. Like night calls on your iPhone.

I have experienced this spam attack today. I immediately emailed apple directly about the problem and contacted them via their Twitter support account. Something needs to be done sooner rather than later because there is simply no excuse for Apple to allow a spam loophole like this to exist.

Same problem here. I spoke to an apple support staff and they said all I can do for now is hide the invite (via putting it in a new calendar and turning offing notifications). For now, she sent the report onto the engineering team apparently. I suggest everyone else with this problem go through the same procedure to encourage Apple to address this issue.

I found this in: https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/09/icloud-photo-sharing-and-calendar-spam/

I tried it on my calendar. Hopefully this will help.

Cut and pasted from this article's comments:

FlashGen • 13 days ago

Unfortunately, Apple has not yet addressed this issue. Apple needs to devise a way to stop allowing access to iCloud accounts.

If you choose "accept", "decline", or "maybe", you are actually sending a notice to the perpetrator of the invitation that your account is an active account. (BRILLIANT, APPLE!!) By choosing one of these options, you are opening your account or to more spam.

There is, however, a workaround. Go to calendars. Create a new calendar. Call it "spam", or some other name of your choice. When you receive the invitation, click on the invitation. Change the calendar from whichever calendar it is currently under to your newly created calendar (mine is "spam"). Then simply delete your spam calendar. In this way you have deleted the invitation (which, by the way, is sometimes an all day event for several days). You have also not sent any notification that your account is an active account, and therefore open to more spam. Good luck!

I tested this workaround myself. I had my wife send me a calendar invite from her iPhone. I made a "spam" calendar in iCloud.com and moved her invite to that calendar. I didn't accept/delete the invite at any point, just assigned it to the "spam" calendar.

Then I deleted the entire "spam" calendar, not her invite. I didn't get any sort of prompt/message/warning that it would send any notifications, but my wife DID GET a declined message once I deleted the calendar with the invite in it.

So I am NOT convinced this is a safe workaround. It failed in my one and only test. Maybe others had better luck.

I deleted all calendars synced to my account through iCloud and it went away. I also changed my iCloud password. This isn't the first time I've had issues with my iCloud account. A few months ago I had iMessage hacked and messages sent in Chinese. Apple needs to do more about their security.

I realized this morning that I could just delete the iOS calendar app entirely from my iOS devices. So for iDevice users who aren't using calendar, this is a possible workaround until Apple steps up and addresses this ridiculous problem.

You cannot delete Calendar from OSX though, but just thought I'd add this as an option for iOS users. If people begin deleting their app, I'm sure they'll take notice.

Thanks!

This is undoubtedly the best work around. The idea of reducing functionality by removing the "Show Found in Apps calendar" preference and breaking the email invites is a productivity killer making it unacceptable.

Googling and looking around the Apple communities this seems to have been an issue for quite a while, This month it appears to have become significantly more prevalent. I figure most people just decline the event, so I suspect the Apple iCloud spam metrics to significantly go up along with costs, though fixing it in the calendar app would probably be a lot cheaper.

On your instructions, I can't find the little gear symbol on the calendar. I signed into icloud, there is no calendar to open from there, and I went to the calendar itself and there is no gear symbol anywhere on that app. How exactly do you find it?

When I got the first Spam calendar invitation, I completely disabled the "calendar" part of iCloud on my Mac as I'm not using the iCloud calendar, but I still got new spam invitations notifications! This is absolutely insane. Apple needs to kill this feature immediately and reenable it once it's fixed.

In the mean time, I completely signed out of my iCloud account on the Mac. Apple, please make this a high priority. Getting spam right on my desktop is absolutely intolerable! Thanks!