nanog mailing list archives

Re: Abuse Contact Handling


From: Tom Beecher <beecher () beecher cc>
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2021 14:12:48 -0400


If you’re complaining about having to maintain an abuse desk or putting a
dummy address into your whois records, sturgeons law says most of the time
you’re the sort of provider who doesn’t want to staff an abuse desk.


At my previous job for an ISP, I was the abuse desk among my other
responsibilities.

Fully 50% of "abuse" reports were "STOP PINGING ME".  Another 20% were one
gentleman who forwarded every spam message he ever received, adamantly
refusing to use the 'Report Spam' button in our webmail application.

Even today, in my current role,I have had countless 'abuse' issues
escalated to my level that turned out to be things that have nothing to do
with our network at all.

When reporters don't understand the difference between 'abuse' and
'annoyance', abuse mailboxes become nothing more than a relic of the past.

On Fri, Aug 6, 2021 at 11:52 AM Suresh Ramasubramanian <ops.lists () gmail com>
wrote:

If the way x is managing their network or (not) managing their customers
means my network and my customers are affected ..

route leaks? packet kiddies? phish sites? spammers? whatever.  If what
you’re doing or not doing affects someone else, expect complaints, possibly
to your  upstreams if you aren’t receptive to these.

Not everybody mailing your abuse address is reporting random alerts their
$50 home router’s firewall throws up, or is trying to spam you.

OK. All that stuff happens but is easy enough to filter out, and well,
spammers who add an abuse address to their lists deserve all the blocking
they get.

If you’re complaining about having to maintain an abuse desk or putting a
dummy address into your whois records, sturgeons law says most of the time
you’re the sort of provider who doesn’t want to staff an abuse desk.

--srs
------------------------------
*From:* NANOG <nanog-bounces+ops.lists=gmail.com () nanog org> on behalf of
Mike Hammett <nanog () ics-il net>
*Sent:* Friday, August 6, 2021 7:51:04 PM
*To:* Matt Corallo <nanog () as397444 net>
*Cc:* NANOG <nanog () nanog org>
*Subject:* Re: Abuse Contact Handling

"we don’t get to tell someone they’re managing their network wrong"

Sure we do. They don't have to listen, but we get to tell them. RFCs are
full of things that one shall not do, must do, etc. We shame network
operators all of the time for things they do that affect the global
community.



-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com

Midwest-IX
http://www.midwest-ix.com

------------------------------
*From: *"Matt Corallo" <nanog () as397444 net>
*To: *"Mike Hammett" <nanog () ics-il net>
*Cc: *"NANOG" <nanog () nanog org>
*Sent: *Friday, August 6, 2021 8:50:00 AM
*Subject: *Re: Abuse Contact Handling

Costs real money to figure out, for each customer scanning parts of the
internet, if they’re doing it legitimately or maliciously. Costs real money
to look into whether someone is spamming or just sending bulk email that
customers signed up for. And what do you do if it is legitimate? Lots of
abuse reports don’t follow X-ARF, so now you have to have a human process
than and chose which ones to ignore. Or you just tell everyone to fill out
a common web form and then the data is all nice and structured and you can
process it sanely.

Like Randy said, we don’t get to tell someone they’re managing their
network wrong. If you don’t want to talk to AWS, don’t talk to AWS. If you
want them to manage their network differently, reach out, understand their
business concerns, help alleviate them. Maybe propose a second Abuse
Contact type that only accepts X-ARF that they can use? There’s lots of
things that could be done that are productive here.

Matt


On Aug 6, 2021, at 08:08, Mike Hammett <nanog () ics-il net> wrote:


I suppose if they did a better job of policing their own network, they
wouldn't have as much hitting their e-mail boxes.



-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com

Midwest-IX
http://www.midwest-ix.com

------------------------------
*From: *"Matt Corallo" <nanog () as397444 net>
*To: *"Mike Hammett" <nanog () ics-il net>, "NANOG" <nanog () nanog org>
*Sent: *Thursday, August 5, 2021 3:44:43 PM
*Subject: *Re: Abuse Contact Handling

There's a few old threads on this from last year or so, but while
unmonitored abuse contacts are terrible, similarly,
people have installed automated abuse contact spammer systems which is
equally terrible. Thus, lots of the large hosting
providers have deemed the cost of actually putting a human on an abuse
contact is much too high.

I'm not sure what the answer is here, but I totally get why large
providers just say "we can better protect a web form
with a captcha than an email box, go use that if there's real abuse".

Matt

On 8/5/21 09:14, Mike Hammett wrote:
What does the greater operator community think of RIR abuse contacts
that are unmonitored autoresponders?



-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com

Midwest-IX
http://www.midwest-ix.com




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