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Even Google Calendar isn't safe from hackers any more (www.techradar.com)

submitted 8 months ago by Salamendacious@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Hackers have reportedly found a way to use the Google Calendar as command & control (C2) infrastructure which could create quite a few headaches in the cybersecurity community.

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[-] Robin@lemmy.world 54 points 8 months ago

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.

[-] jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de 22 points 8 months ago

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.

[-] Deconceptualist@lemm.ee 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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.

[-] 108@kbin.social 13 points 8 months ago

Or they have been doing it quietly all along

[-] Goronmon@kbin.social 7 points 8 months ago

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.

[-] ege@lemmy.world 9 points 8 months ago

“even”

[-] DosDude@retrolemmy.com 2 points 8 months ago

This explains the random emails I've gotten for people to join my Google calendar. I can't imagine this tactic working very well...

[-] tsonfeir@lemm.ee -1 points 8 months ago

When was anything made by Google safe?

[-] jimbolauski@lemmy.world 7 points 8 months ago

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.

[-] tsonfeir@lemm.ee 1 points 8 months ago

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”

[-] Salamendacious@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

I've always thought Chromebooks are pretty secure

[-] tsonfeir@lemm.ee 0 points 8 months ago

Based on…?

[-] Infernal_pizza@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago

Can’t run viruses if you can’t run anything /s

[-] halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

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.

[-] tsonfeir@lemm.ee 0 points 8 months ago

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.

this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023

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