Lets Chat About Abuse Reporting

This week, i2Coalition, in conjunction with the Secure Domain Foundation, launched a discussion list designed to figure out how to improve Internet abuse reporting. Abuse reporting is hugely important, but it is not a revenue source for service providers. It is, mostly, a cost centre.

Anytime somebody has a problem of any kind on the Internet, they have the ability to go to a service provider and fill out an abuse report. There are a lot of grievances on the Internet, some legitimate and important, some not so much. It is surprising to find something as important as Internet abuse reporting is as ill-defined as it is. People have different ways of reporting it, different standards and hugely different expectations once they click ’send’. Service providers get stuck trying to sort out and make sense out of it all.

There’s all kinds of different abuse on the Internet, but wouldn’t it be nice if we could all come together and agree on what kinds of information needs to go into an abuse report?

We’re creating a forum to discuss that, and to come to terms with it. We’re discussing effective procedures to get information to providers. Driving towards standardized formats should help everyone in the industry. This will aid service providers by helping them better proceduralize their processing of abuse complaints. We invite the abuse reporting community, including LEA, the IP and anti-abuse communities, to join the service providers in workshop and communication to make progress on some shared goals.