Seeing lots of spam invitations and events in your iPhone Calendar app?
Don’t click on them!
However, if you’re reading this, chances are that it’s a bit too late for that.
If you opened a hyperlink, it could have already got you to certain dubious sites that can potentially corrupt your phone and/or collect your private information.
No worries – there’s a way to get rid of iPhone Calendar viruses and prevent them in the future.
How Can Your iPhone Calendar Get Infected?
If digital users with bad intentions stumble upon the email address that you have associated with your iPhone calendar account, they can use it to send you calendar invites containing malevolent hyperlinks.
Another frequently used method is to trick you into subscribing to a calendar on shady sites, which then provides spammers with means to swarm you with calendar messages related to made-up events.
To make matters worse, these calendars are often disguised as captchas so you might not even know when and where you got hooked.
If you fully grab the bait, you will ultimately end up clicking either a link or a button in the calendar message.
The worst case scenario?
You get redirected to a scam website or directly download malware that can harvest your sensitive data.
How to Recognize the Most Common iPhone Calendar Spam?
Luckily for everyone, there are signs by which you can spot an infected calendar event. These include janky or cryptic URLs and kooky headlines.
Most of the time these spam messages mention specific actions that you need to urgently take, for example getting your phone unhacked or restoring access to your bank account, by clicking a link.
In other words, something like this:
- Your Device Has Been HACKED! Open NOW to Secure Your iPhone
- Free iPhone 14 For 1000 Fastest Users
- Mark tagged you in a video
- ATTENTION VIRUS DETECTED Click Here to Scan Now
- Congratulations! You are the 100.000 Visitor! Click here for Reward
- Click to Subscribe/Tap to Download/Press to Apply
Also, the events can be assigned to a Calendar with suspicious names, such as “CLICK SUBSCRIBE”, which is a pretty obvious red flag.
How to Catch the iPhone Calendar Spam Virus – 2 Ways
The usual first question goes: how did I end up getting spammed with these Calendar invites to begin with?
The usual method is for hackers to get you to subscribe to these fishy calendars or by somehow obtaining your email address directly.
This can happen in two ways:
1. If You Open Fake Captchas
Captchas, as you probably already know, are trivial puzzles or simple problems that you have to complete in order to convince the website that you want to visit that you are not a bot.
While designed to protect you from malwares and scams, these captchas can often benefit hackers more than innocent digital users by allowing fake captchas to evade warnings from your browser and tricking you into typing something that triggers the breach.
These scam websites can be recognized by containing lots of ads of bad reputation and swarms of pop-up messages.
If you’ve ever clicked on some of these baits, you’ll know what we’re talking about here.
In specific cases even tapping the “I’m not a robot” box or just some of the blank space on the page can be used as a trigger to get users to subscribe to a calendar.
Of course, the calendar name would be blanked out or you would notice something odd happening.
Mind games are employed here as you will be too busy with all the pop-ups and captchas to notice the suspicious details and click the “OK” button.
This is all it takes in this case to begin the spam of events with suspicious links in your calendar.
How to Easily Prevent This? Disable pop-ups in the browser that you are using. Let’s assume that this browser is Safari.
Hackers abuse these pop-ups to get you to activate the spamming mechanisms, but you can simply get rid of pop-ups once and for all!
Once you do this, the chances of getting a virus via pop-ups will be almost non-existent.
- Open iPhone Settings.
- Find “Safari” and click it.
- If they aren’t already disabled, do that by hitting “Block Popups”.
2. If Your Email Address Was Obtained by Spammers
How careful are you when providing your email address?
We often take our email address for granted, as passwords should be kept secret, not emails.
While this is true, even obtaining someone’s email address is enough to start making your life more difficult. Be mindful of the following scenarios:
- You have given away your information to websites who profit from selling it to third-party companies without your knowledge or permission.
- A company that has your email address in their records experiences a hacking attack or a data leak.
How to Get Rid of iPhone Calendar Viruses and Unsubscribe From Spam Using Your Device
You can’t remove events from your subscribed calendars one by one. To get rid of spam, you have to remove the whole subscribed calendar.
Here are the precise steps on how to do this:
- Go to your iPhone settings, navigate down, then choose “Calendar.”
- In Calendar, tap “Accounts.”
- Any calendars that you do not recognize in this menu should be selected here!
- Finally, tap “Delete Account.”
You can also report a calendar invite as junk. This will let Apple know about the spam events and they will proceed to block the events from showing up on your device, but also on devices of other Apple users.
You can do this quickly in two simple steps:
- Log in to iCloud services via your iPhone
- Open Calendar, pick the spam event, and click “Report as Junk”.
Ta-da! You should be proud of yourself for making the Internet that little bit of a safer place.
How to Prevent Spam on Your iPhone Calendar in the Future?
1. Stay Clear from Websites that Do Not Have Https Encryption.
These Are Much More Likely to Be a Breeding Ground for Pop-Up Ads and Spam Aimed Towards Your iPhone Calendar.
They have a much higher chance to host pop-ups with the sole purpose of infecting your calendar with spam.
A reputable, verified, and secure website uses encryption and has all of its information secure under the HTTP protocol combined with TLS.
These websites protect not only their own information, but also information that you provide them, including sensitive data such as passwords and, of course, email.
Every secure site should have a designated symbol visible in the URL bar.
S in HTTPS stands for ‘secure’, which is exactly what you should ask from any site that you visit.
2. If You Really Want to Visit a Website that Does Not Have HTTPS Protocol, Use a VPN.
Dangerous websites are filled to the brim with malicious ads and malware just waiting to make your life miserable and this is not limited to just your iPhone Calendar.
However, a good VPN for iPhones will protect you from virtually any threat that comes from these clandestine trouble-makers.
VPNs in general are perfect for preserving your data online, so it will be much harder to give away your email address to anyone you’re not specifically willing to share it with.
3. Take Great Care when Sharing Devices Across a Single Apple ID.
Many iPhone users share their Apple products with others without giving it much thought.
Apple devices (iPads, iWatch, MacBooks, etc.) are often tied to a single ID – keep track of who else has access to these products and devices in order to prevent your data from getting into the wrong hands.
It’s a well-known advice by now, but people still tend to forget it from time to time. Remain one step ahead of spam and viruses!
FAQ
Can These iPhone Calendar Viruses Damage My device?
This is very unlikely, as these spam messages are not technically viruses.
Think of them more as something akin to email spam or phishing, except they choose your iPhone Calendar instead of the usual inbox route.
Do not underestimate them, though, as they still represent an actual security threat and can quickly snowball to become extremely annoying!
I Accidentally Clicked On a Spam Message. Is My Data in Danger?
Hackers nowadays get clever and pretty good at mind games and disguise.
Most of the time the question hits your privacy, security, money, or something else that triggers your fight or flight response and shuts down your cognitive precautions.
So we understand if you took the bait. When you click a spam link in your calendar, it will most probably take you to a phishing page.
In most cases you should still be safe from any serious damage, unless you enter private information here.
If you did that, your data is most likely stolen and will be used to provide the hackers with access to your account.
In other words, clicking the spam message is not yet critically bad, but giving your sensitive data is.
Why Does Apple Allow Everyone to Send Me Calendar Invites?
Tech corporations such as Apple are always stretched between getting a thing to be safe and getting a thing to be done quickly and conveniently.
Syncing iPhone Calendars would be an awfully complicated business if it had all the safety measures on and make the process bulletproof.
On the other hand, hackers love to exploit this convenience-over-safety dilemma.
This issue is not unique to Apple. All calendar-sharing options have a common weak spot, which is a vulnerability to spam.
So, why does everyone allow it?
Well, since these spam messages can usually be recognized quickly and on their own do not represent a big safety issue, the security branches of the big corporations allow it in order to have things remain convenient.
Conclusion
There you go, if you read this carefully you are now fully equipped to get rid of iPhone Calendar viruses and spam, both in preventing them and fixing any potential damage that they have caused.
While they are a pretty terrible nuisance to all Apple users, once you break down their mechanisms and get informed about the methods that can protect your device and your sensitive information, handling these gets to be pretty much a routine.
Or you can just disable the most common ways of getting them by being prudent with your email address and blocking pop-ups.
In any case, enjoy your liberated iPhone Calendar feature, now fresh, clean, and free from spam. Much less stressful, isn’t it?
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Written by Jason Wise
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