[See Top Answer] August 16 Bot Sign-ups on Landing Pages

[WendySmith]

I was delighted to see that I'd had 46 new contacts sign up overnight until I saw that over half of the names were "N****** fortnite." Both offensive and suspicious. Should I delete these new contacts?

[WendySmith]

Hello everyone,

The devs believe the root issue has been resolved as far as identifying and filtering the bot traffic. As of now, all sign-up landing pages should be active again. The devs are also identifying affected accounts, and are working to get these contacts removed, in case the account users hadn't noticed the fake sign-ups yet. We're leaving the service request open to continue tracking for affected accounts, while the devs identify and remove the fake sign-ups from them.

If you're still seeing these bot sign-ups - typically denoted as having "fortnite" or some variation of a particular slur in the name - regardless of whether the email address is a real one or not, it's advised that you unsubscribe and delete these contacts from your account. From previous experience regarding situations like this, I'd personally advise that if you've turned on Confirm Opt-In for your account, to at least temporarily maintain that through the weekend. 

From my previous response:

if you've been affected by these sign-ups, you can:

• Unsubscribe the bot contacts. You can do this either individually, or en masse by exporting them and then re-importing them as a file of unsubscribes.
• Turn on Confirmed Opt-In momentarily so that these contacts do not get immediately added as active contacts.

We'll continue to monitor incoming traffic regarding this issue, and tracking the service request to accounts reporting about it while the request remains open. Posts will be merged into this thread if made outside of it, so we can have all Community posts on this particular topic in one area. Once we've received confirmation from the devs that the issue is considered resolved, we'll update this thread.

[William_A]

Hello @WendySmith ,

That's really unfortunate, and sounds like you were unfortunately targeted by someone with too much time on their hands, or for someone who just wanted to make you feel miserable and mess with your organization's contact records. I'd advise unsubscribing and deleting the most obvious bot sign-ups. Otherwise it may be best to speak with our Review team about this, to see if they'd have any further insight on how best it would be to block out these particular contacts. 

As far as preventative actions you can take, this might vary based on the sign up form being used. reCaptcha triggers for sign up forms made through us based on certain parameters, but if the individual(s) that submitted these suspicious sign-ups is an actual person and not a bot script, then they could theoretically just walk right through all that. Another option may be to simply disable all of your sign up forms for a short period of time until you feel comfortable the attackers have moved on, and then enable the forms again.

Are you running separate sign-up forms between your social media pages and website? Or, if you're using a landing page form, are you able to identify which form was used by the suspicious sign-ups via the landing page's reporting?

One more idea to consider would be having individual sign-up landing pages for your whole web presence - one for your site, one for each social media platform that allows links, etc. This way if you are ever attacked through a single particular source, you can more easily identify which platform you're being attacked on, disable that one particular form, and take any further temporary or permanent privacy / restriction actions, or anti-spam security for the affected platform. This would require extra work, but could pay off in the long run for being able to mitigate these issues if they arise again.

[WendySmith]

I posted a teaser on Facebook yesterday to get signups for my newsletter via the landing page, so I assume that's how the link got out. I'll delete the contacts with the rogue name and monitor to see if I should turn off landing page for a bit. I didn't know I could turn it off.

I read for entertainment. 😁 I wish everyone did.

[Art_J]

We had the same exact thing happen to our newsletter. We had 86 contacts on 8-16-2024.

[KyleR8]

We had over 100 with the same Fortnite name on 8-16-2024. Deleted them all. Monitoring. 

[SkillsforChangeCoach]

Is there a way to block new contacts with a spam filter? I added active confirmation but I still have to go in and delete all of them and it's annoying. They're all putting "fortnite" as the last name, so it'd be easy to block them all if there was a filter. Thanks in advance!

[AFWAsMAT]

I'm having the same issue

[William_A]

Hello everyone,

We've received several other reports of similar suspicious sign-ups all bearing similar naming structure. You may have seen the following banner in your accounts:

At this time, the sign-up landing pages have been disabled for all accounts while our devs look into further ways we can mitigate these sign-ups. In the meantime, if you've been affected by these sign-ups, you can:

• Unsubscribe the bot contacts. You can do this either individually, or en masse by exporting them and then re-importing them as a file of unsubscribes.
• Turn on Confirmed Opt-In momentarily so that these contacts do not get immediately added as active contacts.

For anyone whose account already has the active service request tracked, you'll receive a notification email from the devs when they have an update. Our team will update this thread accordingly as we receive updates from the devs.

See also:

Understanding unsubscribed contacts

Customize confirm opt-in emails

[William_A]

Hello everyone,

The devs believe the root issue has been resolved as far as identifying and filtering the bot traffic. As of now, all sign-up landing pages should be active again. The devs are also identifying affected accounts, and are working to get these contacts removed, in case the account users hadn't noticed the fake sign-ups yet. We're leaving the service request open to continue tracking for affected accounts, while the devs identify and remove the fake sign-ups from them.

If you're still seeing these bot sign-ups - typically denoted as having "fortnite" or some variation of a particular slur in the name - regardless of whether the email address is a real one or not, it's advised that you unsubscribe and delete these contacts from your account. From previous experience regarding situations like this, I'd personally advise that if you've turned on Confirm Opt-In for your account, to at least temporarily maintain that through the weekend. 

From my previous response:

if you've been affected by these sign-ups, you can:

• Unsubscribe the bot contacts. You can do this either individually, or en masse by exporting them and then re-importing them as a file of unsubscribes.
• Turn on Confirmed Opt-In momentarily so that these contacts do not get immediately added as active contacts.

We'll continue to monitor incoming traffic regarding this issue, and tracking the service request to accounts reporting about it while the request remains open. Posts will be merged into this thread if made outside of it, so we can have all Community posts on this particular topic in one area. Once we've received confirmation from the devs that the issue is considered resolved, we'll update this thread.