[db-wg] abuse-c

On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 01:32:39PM +0100, Jan Meijer wrote:

> > It seems there is a pretty clear need for an extra field in inetnum and
> > inet6num records, specifically something like an abuse-c field
> > referencing a person record.
>
> It's already there :).
> 
> Please check
> http://www.ripe.net/ripe/docs/irt-object.html
> 
> and the TF-CSIRT effort to make it easier to use this:
> http://www.dfn-cert.de/team/matho/irt-object/
> 
> It's not perfect but it's there.

That's exactly the point, IRT is there but far for perfect for the purpose
the original poster is refering to.

The problem is that there are a lot of 'tools' out there who have a
mechansim to query ripe or another db for the inetnum and all person and role
objects asociated with it to find line which contains an '@' to be a valid
address to complain to.

Refering to an abuse address in remarks is possible, but then even you
have to be carefull to not enclose the address in <> as some webbased
tools strip them out.

Not to judge on all, but I get the feeling that there are a lot of people
who don't know what the fields mean, let alone they will know on how to
use the irt object.

So we can start advertising the irt mechanism to both the LIR's and the
people who migth come searching for an address to send a complaint to. I
don't think it is very likely to hit a large public in a reasonable time.

Introducing an extra (mandatory) field in inetnum objects to hold the
abuse address for that specific netblock and nothing more makes it much
more easier for all those people who write automated process to get the
information requested and not have to fallback to listing addresses in
changed: fields as a possible way to complain.

Introducing it and making some noise about it on certain mailinglists and
fora, will probably be picked much faster.

As such can this subject be put an the wg-agenda for ripe-47 ?

To formalize it a little bit I wan't to put forward the proposal to add an
'abuse' field to inetnum and inet6num objects.

This field will be limited to one line containing a syntactically correct
email address which can be used to send abuse complaints on ip-addresses
in that block.

Reasons to do so are to give people an easy way to automate finding a
place to complain and giving LIR's an easy and generic way to publish the
abuse address, without having to resort to the unknown and for the average
database user complex method of the irt-object.

As a side effect this might result in more spammers hitting the abuse box
directly as they harvest the database :)

I'm not stating that this is the best way, but a have a feeling this can
improve things a lot.

Grtx,

Marco Hogewoning