The Evolving Exploitation of Trust

## Overview Fortra's Josh Davis (FIRE threat intelligence) joins Mike Shema to discuss how attackers exploit trusted workflows—not just email filters.

## Calendar and Invite Abuse Calendar invites bypass inbox scrutiny because clients auto-render events. Lures include urgent domain-expiry warnings and fake sales-demo requests. Some campaigns forward invites through compromised employee mailboxes, laundering trust via legitimate senders.

## Tooling and Social Engineering Attackers abuse remote-access tools meant for IT support, blurring lines between RATs and legitimate debugging software. Davis, a former SOC analyst, emphasizes users trust workflows they see daily—calendar pop-ups, internal forwards, familiar brands.

## Takeaways Defenders must monitor calendar ingestion, internal forwarding anomalies, and abuse of legitimate remote-admin tools—not only traditional phishing attachments.