Golf Site Database Hack

spacecoyote

Alright lads.

I noticed my Google calendar showing a booking to stay in a hotel for 4 nights from today (I'd never even heard of the hotel, The Shirley Arms)

So I rang them up to see if there was anyone staying there under my name.

He told me that I was about the 50th call he'd gotten today & asked if I was signed up to any golf sites.

According to the guy there some golf site had their database hacked, but he wasn't sure which site it was.

Anyone else have anything similar happen or any ideas which site it might relate to?

paulos53

I had the same problem.

I got an email yesterday from mygolfdeals advertising that hotel along with the usual greenfee offers and ended up with an entry in my calendar.

Macker1

Same thing happened yesterday to me. An email Titled My Golf News from My Golf Group was involved. I just deleted the booking from my calendar.

FixdePitchmark

same here ?

Sounds like it will be a good laugh and will head up soon :D

Interesting all above in society.

charlieIRL

Same here as well. Wonder what site was hacked?

Only other golf site i use is howdidido, are ye registered on it?

Kimbot

Lads,

Pop your details on this site and it might throw up the site that was affected

https://haveibeenpwned.com/

paulos53

I suspect it is more likely a bug with Google than a database hack

RoadRunner

I got it too. Didn't think it looked like any kind of hack.

My guess is that google read the email and assumed it was the hotel telling me I had a booking. So it thought it was being clever by filling in that event on my calendar.

I wonder if everyone who had this problem received the offer to their gmail email and uses google calendar?

paulos53

RoadRunner wrote: »

My guess is that google read the email and assumed it was the hotel telling me I had a booking. So it thought it was being clever by filling in that event on my calendar.

I disabled that setting in my calendar to stop it happening again

Seve OB

not me, but I don't use google calendar

charlieIRL

I was thinking, what sort of fool hacks a website and adds loads of people to a calendar to stay a a hotel? Surely there must be something more too it??!!!

sector

no way, this happened me too, same dates too. thought it was odd but assumed a bug of some sort & was too busy to think of it again til I seen this, now I'm gonna have to figure out what happened!

edit - ok first this I figure out is that events from gmail are automatically added to your calendar, so they might have spoofed this event to be from gmail themselves, maybe only looked into it for a moment, funny one though.
https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/6084018?hl=en&vid=0-932590950959-1479421369719

MyGolfGroup

Hi Guys,

Seán is my name, I work with My Golf Group. We are the company who sent out the newsletter for Shirley Arms Hotel.

Apologies for the confusion. Please rest assured that our database has not been hacked, I am unsure of why this was being said.

The issue was simply a bug with the "Events from Gmail" feature within the calendar. Basically the calendar figured the newsletter to be a hotel booking and updated your calendars automatically. I have flagged this bug with google, so hopefully they can address it.

If you google "Events from Gmail" and click the support.google page, (Sorry I can't post links as I am a new user) you can learn more about this feature and if you scroll down to "Stop adding events from Gmail automatically" it will instruct you on how to disable this function.

If anyone has any questions or concerns, we are always free to chat on our facebook page, My Golf Group (Again, sorry I can't post links)

FixdePitchmark

MyGolfGroup wrote: »

Hi Guys,

Seán is my name, I work with My Golf Group. We are the company who sent out the newsletter for Shirley Arms Hotel.

Apologies for the confusion. Please rest assured that our database has not been hacked, I am unsure of why this was being said.

The issue was simply a bug with the "Events from Gmail" feature within the calendar. Basically the calendar figured the newsletter to be a hotel booking and updated your calendars automatically. I have flagged this bug with google, so hopefully they can address it.

If you google "Events from Gmail" and click the support.google page, (Sorry I can't post links as I am a new user) you can learn more about this feature and if you scroll down to "Stop adding events from Gmail automatically" it will instruct you on how to disable this function.

If anyone has any questions or concerns, we are always free to chat on our facebook page, My Golf Group (Again, sorry I can't post links)

And why was my personal gmail account in any way associated with the Shirley Arms Hotel ?

PARlance

FixdePitchmark wrote: »

And why was my personal gmail account in any way associated with the Shirley Arms Hotel ?

The email was promoting the Shirley Arms Hotel.

You've signed up for an email from the company that sent you the email at some stage I'm sure, as did I. They've sent us a promotional email, we can unsubsribe to it if we wish at any stage or at least they are obliged to offer an unsubsribe option (I didn't bother checking).

Google read our emails, when they see a date and hotel they can add it to our diary if we allow them. Anyone who got it placed in their diary, like I did, allows them to do so. We can stop Google doing this if we wish.

It was clearly a glitch where Google read the email and placed it in our calendars thinking it was an email confirming a booking to stay in the Shirley Arms.

The company that sent the email should review how they word their emails and Google should sort out the glitch. The Shirley Arms have very little to do with this bar being happy / annoyed with the publicity.

MyGolfGroup

@FixdePitchmark, you have signed up to our newsletter with your gmail address, and we were promoting an offer for The Shirley Arms Hotel via that newsletter. Just as PARlance explained. You can of course unsubscribe from the mailing list by clicking the 'Unsubscribe' button at the bottom of each email we send out. But we'd hope to keep you around.

@PARlance, you are correct in what you are saying about wording. We will be sitting down on Monday, to discuss and test the layout of our emails, to avoid this happening again. Thanks for the feedback.

MyGolfGroup

Just one other thing on this. Hopefully you's can help me out.

What were the dates that were booked in? 15th,16th,17th November?

I am just trying to figure out where google pulled the dates from.

Any help would be appreciated.

PARlance

MyGolfGroup wrote: »

Just one other thing on this. Hopefully you's can help me out.

What were the dates that were booked in? 15th,16th,17th November?

I am just trying to figure out where google pulled the dates from.

Any help would be appreciated.

It had me staying 15th to 18th... probably triggered by the 3 open dates at the bottom of the mail?