Abuse Desks

Wed Apr 29 20:51:19 UTC 2020

On 2020-04-28 18:57, Mike Hammett wrote:
> I noticed over the weekend that a Fail2Ban instance's complain
> function wasn't working. I fixed it. I've noticed a few things:
> 
> 1) Abusix likes to return RIR abuse contact information. The vast
> majority are LACNIC, but it also has kicked back a couple for APNIC
> and ARIN. When I look up the compromised IP address in Abusix via the
> CLI, the APNIC and ARIN ones return both ISP contact information and
> RIR information. When I look them up on the RIR's whois, it just shows
> the ISP abuse information. Weird, but so rare it's probably just an
> anomaly. However, almost everything I see in LACNIC's region is
> returned with only the LACNIC abuse information when the ones I've
> checked on LACNIC's whois list valid abuse information for that
> prefix. Can anyone confirm they've seen similar behavior out of
> Abusix? I reached out to them, but haven't heard back.
> 2) Digital Ocean hits my radar far more than any other entity.
> 3) Azure shows up a lot less than GCP or AWS, which are about similar
> to each other.
> 4) Around 5% respond saying it's been addressed (or why it's not in
> the event of security researchers) within a couple hours. The rest I
> don't know. I've had a mix of small and large entities in that
> response.
> 5) HostGator seems to have an autoresponder (due to a 1 minute
> response) that just indicates that you sent nothing actionable,
> despite the report including the relevant log file entries.
> 6) Charter seems to have someone actually looking at it as it took
> them 16 - 17 hours to respond, but they say they don't have enough
> information to act on, requesting relevant log file entries...  which
> were provided in the initial report and are even included in their
> response. They request relevant log file entries with the date, time,
> timezone, etc. all in the body in plain text, which was delivered.
> 7) The LACNIC region has about 1/3 of my reports.
> 
> Do these mirror others' observations with security issues and how
> abuse desks respond?

Although many people write here - no need to worry about such minor 
things, i strongly disagree.

If someone littering server ssh logs for an hour, most likely on the 
other side:
1) A botnet-infected computer that needs to be fixed. Today ssh 
bruteforce,
tomorrow spam and hosting scam and very real financial losses for some 
people.
2) A hacker who is looking for an easy target. If he succeed, law 
enforcement
will come to you tomorrow and might waste lot of your time. And 
sometimes it’s
some kid who, possibly will get an early warning, will not break his 
life by getting
a criminal term.

And how to fight with lazy operators who start differentiate on abuse, 
which is worth their
majestic attention.
I send proper abuse reports if there is no reaction to them - I make a 
null route of incoming SYN
requests on all my servers, and sometimes i share an IP list with other 
operators who want to live
in a "clean" internet, and not in a garbage dump.
I have several resources hosted, so at the end techies of those 
"majestic ISPs" come with tears,
when their customers start to torture their support and sales, and beg 
to be unlocked and
most start to read abuse mailbox.
Or they just lose customers.