[anti-abuse-wg] New Abuse Information on RIPE NCC Website

Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote the following on 18/06/2013 15:22:
> As a thought experiment, if Furio were to remove LIRs from Eastern
> Europe, in particular, Romania, from his list below, what would RIPE
> NCC's figures fall to?
>
> Most of those /14s are swipped and then re-swipped to a succession of
> shell companies that appear to remain valid for the minimum possible
> duration - and are typically (as creating a shell company in romania
> requires valid ID) set up by the simple expedient of walking into a bar
> and paying a guy there a few euro to get him to use his ID to set up the
> shell company.
>
> So even "a much larger number of customers in the RIPE region" is a
> figure that you would have to allow for substantial inflation in, when
> you consider these numbers.

There is no question in my mind that there is a massive problem in the 
RIPE NCC service region, just as there is elsewhere. I'm not convinced 
that there's any good in comparing them, rather we should admit that 
there is such a problem.

I remain to be convinced that we will ever reach an agreed definition of 
network abuse, but I do think there are types of activity that are 
generally agreed to be abusive. But even with these, do we want the NCC 
to say "Ah, you have operated a botnet to crack credit card numbers, we 
will now deregulate!" I do not believe we will ever reach consensus on 
such a policy.

I *do* believe that there should be more rigour involved in obtaining 
addresses, but there you also have a problem of national law. If a state 
says "this company is a legitimate company" does the NCC have any right 
to argue?

Ronald, I ask this sincerely, and I apologise if I missed it before, but 
what is your definition of 'network abuse'? I'm not asking this to call 
you out, I'm genuinely interested. I know why definitions are important, 
but I also know how hard they can be and given the limitations of what 
the NCC can do (and what I, as an operator, want it to do) I'm not sure 
how much use it will actually be to pursue such a thing.

Are there other ways of looking at this, of tackling it, that have more 
chance of success?

Brian