A new kind of SPAM - for Macs

[httpwebwitch]

A colleague turned on his macbook today, and discovered that his calendar contained a bunch of doctor's appointments that weren't his. Appointments for genital enhancement.

Among them, there were also some "appointments" with ladies inviting him for recreational viewing of their live erotic webcasts.

It seems that iCal invitations sent via email get added to his calendar automatically, with no moderation or approval.

He's an easy target. His email account is the "public" one that the company uses for public relations. So naturally it gets the lions' share of our spam.

Anyone else notice this kind of spam?

[weeks]

That's his story and he's sticking to it.

Anyway, all of my Mac clients just love iCal; I haven't hear of this but a public calendar on a system such as iCal (not really designed for that, but public calendar added as a feature) sounds problematic. I do not use iCal. I use the Office Entourage calendar instead.

[travelin cat]

I use the notification feature in iCal a lot.

I wonder if these spammers have found a way to send out bulk iCal notifications, because it seems like a very inefficient way to send out spam. As I see it, you have to create an event in iCal and then add attendees to be notified. The attendees can be picked up from the Address Book or entered manually, either way seems to be a very time consuming way to spam.

[commanderW]

Hi - Tell your colleague to open 'preferences' for iCal, and click on the 'advanced' tab. At the bottom, is a check box that says "automatically retrieve invitations from email" (I'm using the latest version, They may have to poke around to find this checkbox in an older version.). Tell them to uncheck it.

I went and searched the website [macintouch.com ] and found this info in a thread from february 25-27 2008 ( I guess it's a feature, not a bug :)