Russian SPAM influx

I had to turn all notifications off Andrew - to preserve my sanity! I'm fortunate that we only use Freshdesk as a legacy system now - so the impact of notifications is negligible.

@Andrew the notification in the app is separate from the email notification. In the app you can switch off notifications for new mails. Unfortunately this cannot be customised for specific circumstances.

@Andrew I have disabled new ticket notifications in the app and left the ticket assignment notification open. I also added an auto assignment rule for new tickets so now I only get the legitimate tickets who are not moved to spam and assigned to me. This is of course not a good solution but at least we can work for now.

Paul, would your rule block potentially legitimate email addresses like

stiltskin.rumpel@gmail.com

P.S. Just started getting them too last night too. Weird for Freshdesk to get hit like this...

Thanks all of you for your contributions. Because of them, my sanity may be restored in a week or so.  The workarounds are doing their trick.

Paul (and company), wouldn't your method block legit email addresses like

stiltskin.rumpel@gmail.com ?

I'm being hit by this as well, happens every night now for the last 3 nights. Will try the .ru blocker in the subject, at least.

Just checked what has been going on and the Bot has changed its approach and does not include the .ru domain. It does now use the term часов! for the overnight attack on my account, so I will be adding this to the dispatcher conditions email and "subject and description".

@Kyle Yes, but the chances of my customer having this email is slim and there is more chance of spinning straw into gold 

I'm following the advice of @WireVPN and setting up the dispatcher rules.

Thanks muchly for the advice. I'm certainly getting tired of the hundreds of spam emails.

Pat

Any ideas on how to avoid contacts being created and deleted the ones already created by spam?

Have been attacked by Russian bots. 6000+ tickets in one night. And they are evergrowing. Please provide a solution as this is a wide problem now. 

Freshdesk,

This needs to be stopped by better spam filtering in your system. The resolution that everyone can configure their own rules to fix this is not enough since

a) You just offload this work to your customers instead of solving it for them. We are purchasing a service from you - make it a good one!
b) The numbering of tickets becomes useless - volume spam needs to be stopped before becoming tickets.
c) Similar to above - new contacts are created and overflowing because of spam created tickets - no resolution to this yet.

This has been happening since last week off and on, this needs to be resolved on the Freshdesk end. These should not be created as contacts or tickets. These are all being sent to support@ourhelpdesk.freshdesk.com for ours as well, and address we do not advertise or use.

We've also had 5000+ messages from Russia today, causing a whole load of mess. I've set up a dispatcher rule which will recognise a term that is always in the 'requester name' field, so it's getting rid of them, but I'm constantly getting 'Updated/New Ticket' notifications whenever one comes in (every couple of seconds at the moment) and the ticket numbers are being incremented which is also very annoying.

Freshdesk need to do something immediately - this is not a cheap service, and it's basically unusable as it stands. We cannot just block Russian domains/language as our helpdesk is fully international.

I spoke to Freshdesk through the chat portal, and they have now enabled the 'Proactive SPAM Filter' on our account - it seems to have solved the problem as new tickets are no longer being created. It seems this filter is not on by default for all users, so if you are still having constant incrementation in ticket numbers and Dispatch'r is still 'busy', I would recommend contacting them to ask them to turn it on.

The only issue is that it is a 'black hole' i.e. you don't ever see those rejected messages, nor does the requester get a 'bounce back' to know it's been rejected. I guess if it's a good filter, this isn't a problem, but I can't help thinking some tickets may never reach us...

They are also implementing a feature to prevent wildcard email addresses being accepted which they hope to roll out soon.

Chris, are you sure this does what you want? From what I read, they finish up in the spam folder of your account, and can be reactivated again if necessary. But as far as I understand the system, that would still mean they are assigned a number.   

Hi Mark,

As far as the support guy told me, they don't go into the spam folder of the account and no tickets are created (the symptom I was trying to avoid, but is solved by a Dispatch'r rule) - it's a pre-emptive strike before they reach Freshdesk. I'm referring to the so-called 'Proactive SPAM filter', not the spam/captcha options within Freshdesk - it cannot be viewed/amended by users/agents, only by Freshdesk staff. Since it was enabled, all Russian emails have stopped, and my ticket numbers are no longer incrementing every couple of seconds.

Chris

As the original poster - I thought I'd update - FreshDesk support still only recommends the Cyrillic alphabet workaround in Dispatch'r / Supervisor (which does work) -- but doesn't reduce the load on their servers, hence our overall experience. They also have offered the "new SPAM filtering engine" -- which has helped some, but yesterday and today we still saw a few hundred Russian SPAM messages come in and get tagged by our rules.

They did present the option of upgrading to the Estate plan where you can do domain whitelisting for 40 domains beyond any contacts you already have -- again, it seems they should be working on better enforcement of things like SPF / DKIM / etc - especially when the email is hitting the alias@mydomain.freshdesk.com.

I surmise that everyone having this problem is probably setup like us, you have a support@ or help@ email to your domain being forwarded to the FreshDesk domain tied in to your account. It is this account that is getting SPAM'd -- not ours. FreshDesk doesn't quite seem to understand that - at least none of the support techs that I've talked with.

Their team is "busy working" on solutions - but they haven't posted anything publicly about this or treated as a degraded performance problem.... which I disagree with the approach of keeping it hidden. Overall, I'm quite frustrated!

Am I wrong thinking I should see some "incident" page where they acknowledge the problem?

Happening regularly to my company, applied supervisor and dispatch rules but still they sometimes get through and I am concerned Spiro how they got the details of who to send these to. At first they were created via email but now they are coming via the portal.

I'm thinking of moving away as this has gone on for too long now and I have only been using the service for a few months, shame as I like the rest of the product but with these issues and how much I'm paying its not worth it when there are other solutions out there.

this is becoming crazy!!!! I am getting thousands of spam.. the rule has helped to keep them out but how do I get rid of the contacts being created.

One way is to get Freshdesk to set up Proactive SPAM Filter on your account. Works fine for us, and I don't see any contacts created. Obviously I don't know how much we are no longer getting...  

@markHow to enable that?

Easiest? Click on Freddy (chat bottom right of screen) and request info on Proactive SPAM Filter. This will get you a support ticket. It is normally set up within 30 mins.