Hackers use AI to target Microsoft Teams and calendar invites in new phishing surge

Cyberattacks are increasingly evolving beyond traditional email to target meeting invites and workplace collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams, with artificial intelligence driving 86% of these phishing efforts and making fake messages significantly harder to detect. This shift matters because calendar invites represent a critical security blind spot that many organizations under-protect, with recent data showing a 49% surge in such attacks and nearly one-third of incidents involving attackers impersonating internal colleagues to trick employees. Workers across industries are now affected as malicious links are embedded directly into meeting metadata, auto-appearing on their calendars without any initial click, forcing organizations to update security training and disable auto-acceptance for external invites to prevent credential theft and malware installation.