Russian SPAM influx

Yes, I had initially thought that the ticket counter was not being increased, but it unfortunately is. As well, the contact is still being created now. The webhook was working for a while, but at some point it started failing. Unfortunately this is still a big problem for us.

One additional thing that may work for some of you and not for others (it works in our business) is in Admin -> Helpdesk, set "Who can log in (or) sign up (or) create tickets?" to "Users from whitelisted domains (includes existing contacts and company domains)" this prevents tickets from being created unless the contact already exists. Obviously this will not work for some businesses as you don't want to restrict it in this way.

On a side note, we'll be moving the Salesforce Support for ticketing soon. We can't do business with a company that refuses to acknowledge and fix this massive of an issue.

We were also hit by thousands of Russian SPAM. Ticket # counts up and contacts are created. We are using dispatcher rules to mark and delete those tickets.

Not happy as the ticket no. is noticed by permanent customers.

Yesterday's and today's answer of freshdesk support:

"Our developers are very close to building a feature that would complete stop ticket creation of emails sent to the catchall which should stop this issue completely…

Once we roll out the fix, I will drop you an email. This should stop spam ticket creation and the contact addition. This is our top priority at the moment."

While typing this I can see the SPAM coming in on the screen of my smartphone.

BR

Its happening here too i had tickets being created at an alarming rate a few weeks ago.

I thought the problem had gone untill i went into the contacts to find some 8k of contacts in there i dont want.

Concerns me that these contacts could gain access to other tickets once created.

Just had this from them

Dale, a few of our customers and other ticketing systems were also affected by the Russian SPAM attack.

it seems like the Russian spammers are targeting these default support addresses in order to create tickets and hamper the productivity in the helpdesk.In order to combat this, we are enabling spam filters which would identify and spam these tickets during ticket creation and also we are restricting the ticket creation from the default support.

Three months and nothing fixed? That's sad.

Why you didn't apply those rules to everyone?

I am not sure why FreshDesk have not solved this problem, but as far as I am aware, everyone has to enter the Dispatch'r rule in their own system, as well as the webhook to remove the contact. For everyone the spam still finishes up in the spam folder in tickets, and (I think) the contact as a deleted contact. 

and the next wave coming to our helpdesk ... *bing* *bing* *bing* *bing* (listening to the notification sound)

We're in disucssion with Accelo who offer a pretty good product. Not just service desk but all Operations. Looks good and the demo we had from a support perspective was optimistic. They have features that Freshdesk have been missing such as the ability for clients to check their remaining retatiner hours for example (when we aproached FD about this they wanted us to pay a developer to create that functionality!)

All round we have had a disappointing overall experience with FD. Not just the spam business.

This has started happening to me as well. The dispatch'r rule to mark the message as spam hide it from view but it still appears under Recent Activities and also sends push notifications to all of our smart phones.

If more people are starting to expeirnce this issue it suggests Freshdesk still have some backdoor open that is revealing service desks to the hackers. Surely that should have been closed by now? 

It's a very big Disaster! More than 3 Month and no solution for this problem. That is a great shame for Freshdesk! We have now more than 12000 spam accounts in our customer database. We must delete this all manually. We could not select more than 90 customers to delete per time.

Is there any way to delete all customers with Russian letters in there name?

We are also looking for an alternate. We are looking for a system: who we can import the tickets, customers and knowledge base from Freshdesk. Any suggestions?

We just spent a ridiculous amount of time deleting nearly 10000 contacts ourselves (ones created before we learned of the webhook).

We were told the problem was fixed last week and today its back to be utterly screwing us over.

I am also now looking for an alternative. We are done with this.  How hard is it really to just delete/remove/block ANY email from these default addresses we don't use.  Obnoxious.   

.. Its been going on for months and nothing was done. 
They only propose to delete the stuff via automation in the dispatch , but all your ticket numbers, losing count of your support ticket numbers ....
If email is too risky, why cant we simply have instruction on how to setup a non email based setup ? 
Where the client only gets an email he had a solution in his account...  
Looks like someone wants to get rid of freshdesk and they are slowly succeeding. .and Freshdesk dont seem care about this issue... :-( 

So if anyone has a way to export and reuse freshdesk data , now would be a good time to know... before it all goes down 

We are having the same issue and get hundreds of these a day - is there any sort of communication from FD regarding this ? 

I got this email on July 3rd from their support representative:

***************

We have rolled out a new feature to your account, which would resolve the Russian spam issues. Moving forward, the forwarding would only happen for the emails and the corresponding forwarding addresses mentioned under Admin-->Email in your Freshdesk account.

Also, the default support address support@************.freshdesk.com will no longer work and no tickets would be created for emails sent to this. Please do check this out and let me know in case of any clarifications.

This is ridiculous, having to setup all the dispatcher rules to remove russian tickets.  Why isn't Freshdesk doing something about the hacking?

I'm also getting Russian contacts added, which I can not filter out with a rule, I have to manually delete them.

I'm looking at alternative products now, that will allow me to import my freshdesk tickets and knowledge base over.

We have been having this same issue for months now. We have a Supervisor rule setup to delete tickets created with Russian characters but the Contact records are still there 1000's and 1000's of them which makes it hard to manage our contacts list with tons' of unwanted records.

I can only second Spiro:
this forum won't help ... just contact FD directly using the chat icon at the bottom right, they are very responsive and enabled the "spam protection feature", after which the SPAM stopped immediately. However this can only be enabled if you have custom email email addresses configured, because this "feature" will block the default incoming email addresses used by spammers. Even though it's interesting to read about others sharing the problem, the solution is to chat with them directly and get it addressed.

After that the dispatch'r rules become obsolete.

Just stating the obvious - every customer in this thread would want these additional SPAM checks enabled.  Something you enable by default on all new accounts should OF COURSE be enabled on existing accounts.  Why would we have to specifically request this, when we had to initiate this whole thread about it?

Granted, our influx has mostly subsided and we have both Dispathch'r and Observer rules in action (error - excuse me, "Automation" rules now) - which seem to work fine, aside from the occasional ticket that comes in and is tagged as SPAM, incrementing our ticket count.

Consider us +1 existing customer requesting this enablement

FYI  Solution I found 
UNABLE TO DELETE SOME OF THE SPAM EMAIL 

When you delete all the spam email account, there is always a bunch that will not delete 

Click on email account to edit 

change the email to anything else

save

retry to delete this account ...

Worked for me every time ...

Update for all those still struggling - I logged a support ticket with Freshdesk, on request added them as an occasional user.  They logged in, removed the tens of thousands of contacts for me and enabled the filters.  They were reasonably quick with this, and my spam influx problem has now been resolved.

Instead of struggling for months on my own, I should have logged it with them long ago!