Do I understand correctly that this is not at all an exploit for Google Calendar itself, but just uses the Calendar share functionality to communicate to already infected hosts? That can be applied to pretty much any service with publicly accessible of sharable data though... I'd call this website out for clickbait but it seems like every tech news website is copy-pasting this same fearmongering article.
this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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I'm actually surprised that this wasn't seen before. It's a domain that can't be blocked in lots of companies, and frequent requests to it won't raise any flags in any company that uses Google Workspace.
Yep, this. A couple years ago, Google Drive sharing was used in a loosely similar way to deliver malware, and Google had to build some new controls. I'm surprised it took the baddies this long to exploit GCal.
Or they have been doing it quietly all along
I don't know, I'm really interested in all these internet services that are 100% safe from hackers. Sounds like very useful information that should be shared around.
“even”
This explains the random emails I've gotten for people to join my Google calendar. I can't imagine this tactic working very well...
When was anything made by Google safe?
They are encoding commands in calendar events there is not a vulnerability in Google calendar. After your device is compromised its commanded to subscribe to a calendar. Those events have commands. Since checking your calendar is a normal event unlike connecting to a nefarious server it becomes more difficult to discover.
Is it? Everything is in their cloud. You’d think since they have all the data they might check it for malicious activity. I guess that’s not much of a priority for them because it’s hard to tell what’s malicious and what’s “Google”
I've always thought Chromebooks are pretty secure
Based on…?
Can’t run viruses if you can’t run anything /s
I mean security through obscurity is a real thing. It's not real security, but the risk of attack is still lower than it would be otherwise. It's the primary reason Macs had so little malware at the time and Apple's marketing leveraged that for billions in advertising. Generally malware creators target the maximum number of devices, and MacOS and ChromeOS are small pickles compared to Windows. Even now, you're looking at Windows being about 70% of the market, OSX being around 20% and Chrome OS sitting at a whopping 4%. Most malware is based around striking as many victims as possible quickly before it is discovered and the exploits patched. doesn't matter.
Well, a significant portion of windows users aren’t running the latest version. Heck, you can hardly get people to install a security update on windows.
ChromeOS doesn’t really need a virus anyway because the whole OS is leaking your info back to Google anyhow.