[anti-abuse-wg] Question about spam to abuse inbox

Hi Cynthia,

 

I got that, sorry not having been clear. I was just expanding what I think should not be done even if some resource-holders do (any kind of filtering of what’s allowed to come in to the abuse mailbox).

 

With fail2ban you can for example:

 
Detect intrusion attempts (SMTP, SSH, FTP, SIP, DNS, etc.),  and decide if you consider an intrusion attempt something that retries more than 5 times in 10 minutes.
Then you send the abuse report.
And block that IP for 8 hours.
If the IP retries after that, then you can define that for “n” retries in “m” minutes, the IP is banned for 8 days … and so on.
 

You could also configure it so warnings of “whatever” are internally send to the relevant staff for manual handling.

 

One possible measure that you can take is to send an automated email such as “if you haven’t sent sufficient logs/details to investigate the case … your email will be ignored, so please resend it if x and y, at least, are missing”. If they continue to send emails without those details, either via an autoresponder or manually, send them a message to inform that due to the high volume of abuse reports without the relevant information, you are forced to ban them for “n days”.

 

I think this is at the end very dependent on your own case, resources available, etc., but agree, everything on this discussion is useful!

 

Saludos,

Jordi

@jordipalet

 

 

 

El 18/2/21 15:06, "Cynthia Revström" <me at cynthia.re> escribió:

 

Hi Jordi,

 

Sorry I was probably a bit unclear, I don't filter based on content for the abuse inbox.

But as I don't filter based on content, I feel like in some cases I need to sort of have manual fail2ban.

 

I really like your point though and I don't know how I blanked out on a temporary block being a potential solution.

Because the main thing I was afraid of is, what if another one of their customers gets this address and actually has legitimate abuse emails?

But temporarily blocking the sender is a good enough solution to me at least considering the very low volume of abuse emails I get on a regular basis.

 

Also to clarify these emails in particular were complete nonsense such as "I am under ddos from you, please help" with no other details.

They were also sent with invalid SPF, and I don't think the from addresses were actually the senders.

 

Also just a few minutes ago, the abuse contact replied saying that they had taken action so I hope this specific case is now fixed.

I still think it is/was a useful topic though as there might be less obvious situations or situations where the abuse contact of the sender doesn't cooperate.


-Cynthia

 

 

On Thu, Feb 18, 2021 at 1:58 PM JORDI PALET MARTINEZ via anti-abuse-wg <anti-abuse-wg at ripe.net> wrote:

In my experience, this is something you need to live with, and not filter anything in the spam folder.

 

Why? Because it can be real spam (and then you can use the abuse contact of the resource-holder for the addresses where the spam is coming from), when you report abuse cases, to facilitate the work of the involved parties, you should be allowed to attach or include headers, logs, etc. that probe that it is an abuse (from your perspective).

 

If you filter that, then you will not receive many abuse reports …

 

For example, some abuse mailboxes filter specific URLs or domains. If the header contains such domain, how are you going to be able to send that?

 

I use fail2ban and block automatically specific IP addresses or ranges once the abuse has been reported and keeps repeating. Depending on the frequency of the repetitions, how many, etc., etc., I could increase automatically from a few hours to days or weeks the banning.

 

Regards,

Jordi

@jordipalet

 

 

 

El 18/2/21 13:40, "anti-abuse-wg en nombre de Cynthia Revström via anti-abuse-wg" <anti-abuse-wg-bounces at ripe.net en nombre de anti-abuse-wg at ripe.net> escribió:

 

Hi aa-wg,

 

For some context, today and yesterday I have been receiving spam in the form of fake abuse notices to my abuse contact email address.

 

Is there a generally accepted standard for when it's okay to block an address or a prefix from emailing your abuse contact?

 

I consider being able to contact the abuse email address of a network a rather important function, so I prefer not to block it.

But also as I have more relaxed spam filters for the abuse contact to make sure nothing gets lost, it feels like blocking the address/prefix is my only option other than manually filtering through these emails (10 so far in total, today and yesterday).

 

So back to the question, is there a generally accepted point at which blocking an address/prefix is fine?

 

Thanks,
-Cynthia


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