North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Active and available abuse desks

  • From: J. Oquendo
  • Date: Tue Jan 04 00:15:35 2005

On Mon, 3 Jan 2005, Matt Hess wrote:

>
> I'm curious as to what people feel is pro-active for the internet
> community as far as an available and active abuse desk goes.. As of late
> I run into more and more automated groups who I personally think are
> very wrong for forcing reports to come in via e-mail or web submission only.

Quite obvious I am the expert of nothing so here is my take on abuse
desks. Most of the times abuse desk work has been delegated to systems
engineers/admins who often have too much *work* to fully address abuse
work. Sort of understandable when you take a look at say AOL's moronic
"Click here to report abuse" functions where people often click the wrong
button often overwhelming innocent (and not so innocent) networks. This
is a waste of money for any company so I could see where companies
would be reluctant to hire someone dedicated to explaining to cluebies
what the heck a spoofed email is, and why they just happened to send
themselves a message. Which reminds me, being the admin of my own
machines I just received a message notifying me that my admin was
suspending my account. Woe is me.

> The argument I have been presented is that those ISP's should not have
> to offer an actual human being on an abuse desk for non-customers as
> they make no money on it.

ISP's, heck any company for that matter is likely to shoot the task of
that sort of work to their systems teams, and or have their netops teams
CC'd with messages of this sort. I can't think of any network outside of
spamming INSERT_NICER_WORD_FOR_SCUMBAGS_HERE that would not take abuse
mail serious considering no one would really want their networks blocked.

> My take is that this is an inherent expense to having customers.. that
> expense is part of being involved with the internet and should be
> expected of a provider who wishes to be taken seriously in the internet
> community.

I hope this message was out of boredom sort of like my response. I can't
think of anyone who wouldn't take abuse serious. Yet I can't think of any
specific reason why someone should be paid to do something that would
normally fall under the task of a system/network administrator. That is
sort of akin to having a carburetor mechanic to work along with your
engine mechanic no?

> *dons flame retardant.. well, everything*

I'm with you on that and I raise your flame retardant to bulletproofing.

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J. Oquendo
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