{"id":5028,"date":"2024-02-29T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2024-02-29T19:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/?p=5028"},"modified":"2024-02-29T11:30:18","modified_gmt":"2024-02-29T18:30:18","slug":"wix-groups-being-abused-for-web-spam-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/2024\/02\/29\/wix-groups-being-abused-for-web-spam-campaign\/","title":{"rendered":"Wix Groups Being Abused For Web Spam Campaigns"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, we noted how web spammers were <a title=\"Spammers Still Abusing Drupal Webform Module to Put Spam PDFs and Pages on Websites\" href=\"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/2024\/02\/28\/spammers-still-abusing-drupal-webform-module-to-put-spam-pdfs-and-pages-on-websites\/\">abusing the Webform module for Drupal to place spam files on websites<\/a>. We continue to look into that spam campaign and found another interesting aspect of it. Spammers are also abusing the <a href=\"https:\/\/support.wix.com\/en\/article\/wix-events-using-wix-groups-to-promote-your-events\">Groups feature of the Wix<\/a> managed website service. That is notable, as services like that are supposed to handle a lot of the work for you. It would seem like flagging this type of spam is something they should be doing, but it doesn&#8217;t appear being doing that.<\/p>\n<p>In one example we looked at, the spam campaign was also apparently abusing LinkedIn as the content posted on the Wix Group on a website was linking to now non-existent pages on LinkedIn:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/wix-groups-spam-1.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-5029\" src=\"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/wix-groups-spam-1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"980\" height=\"366\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/wix-groups-spam-1.png 980w, https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/wix-groups-spam-1-300x112.png 300w, https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/wix-groups-spam-1-768x287.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px\" \/><\/a>That same impacted website, a Christian academy, also had spam added to the group that seems more problematic to the specific website, as it was promoting pornography:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/wix-groups-spam-2.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-5030\" src=\"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/wix-groups-spam-2.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"616\" height=\"637\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/wix-groups-spam-2.png 616w, https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/wix-groups-spam-2-290x300.png 290w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px\" \/><\/a>It seems like Wix could do a better job of handling this. It also is a reminder that spammers will take advantage of the ability to post content on websites, so any functionality that allows that should be disabled if not used and otherwise be moderated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, we noted how web spammers were abusing the Webform module for Drupal to place spam files on websites. We continue to look into that spam campaign and found another interesting aspect of it. Spammers are also abusing the Groups feature of the Wix managed website service. That is notable, as services like that are &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/2024\/02\/29\/wix-groups-being-abused-for-web-spam-campaign\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Wix Groups Being Abused For Web Spam Campaigns&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[240,282],"class_list":["post-5028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spam","tag-wix","tag-wix-groups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5028"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5032,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5028\/revisions\/5032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whitefirdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}