To create an abuse report, you must first determine where and to whom to send the message and then actually send it. Depending on the format you used to report to the receiving network, you might be asked for more information, get a ticket number, or never hear anything back. The abuse might stop, or it might continue unabated. Sending reports in bulk and automating this process is cumbersome and painful. For this reason, many people don’t bother to report abuse, which means a lot of abuse goes unreported, so it never gets action, and the abuse is allowed to continue, or it goes undetected until someone else reports it. Ultimately, the faster reports are sent, the quicker the reaction to these can be. The other problem is the formatting of the abuse report. Some people send manual notifications, with unstructured data just present in an email, which means it can’t easily be machine readable. Therefore, the report’s recipient must manually enter or ignore the details. We’ve provided several tools over the years to help with global reporting:
  • Abusix published the free-to-use ContactDB service in 2010 for reporters to quickly determine where to send network abuse reports for any address around the globe.
  • We also created an extensible reporting standard (XARF) in 2012 so that any network abuse can be reported in a standard format, helping reporters and receivers of reports.
  • AbuseHQ was developed to help receivers of reports, processing and parsing all of your abuse reports and condensing them into a much smaller number of individual cases. This easy-to-use solution allows your to quickly prioritize cases based on the report types and severity (often based on the number of reports received from different reporters) and automate everyday tasks, allowing your , trust and safety, legal teams, and security operations to be much more efficient.
Now, Abusix is announcing a significant upgrade to our Global Reporting project. This release of our project aims to increase the amount and quality of reports and the number of entities sending them by providing Abuse Reporting as a free service.
Provided you can meet the minimum requirements for the class of abuse that you are reporting (e.g., the required fields for a given report type), we’ll generate and send the reports in XARF to the responsible on your behalf. Global Reporting provides the following benefits.
  • Abusix’s Global Reporting Service is free to reporters and receivers
  • Helps drive the adoption of XARF as “THE” Abuse Reporting standard, helping receivers automate handling
  • Reduces the number of reporting formats for receivers to process
  • Reduces the amount of unstructured reports sent to receivers
When you use Abusix Global Reporting, you also have the option to allow us to use the data to improve our other services, such as Guardian Mail. Additionally, Global Reporting allows us to build feedback for reporters and receivers with a quality and reputation report rating system. It also allows us to track the amount of abuse sent to each , enabling us to enhance the network rating system, identifying networks that fail to act on their reports or who act on reports slowly. To get started,
  1. Ensure you can generate the minimum data required for a given abuse type (XARF Schema) https://github.com/abusix/xarf/tree/master/schemas/3
  2. Create a Data Channel API endpoint here https://app.abusix.com
  3. Use our example code to post to our API here link
  4. Once you send us abuse reports, we will review your data, approve your API Key, and send out reports on your behalf.
We’d love to hear from you at [email protected] if you’d like to use Abusix’s Global Reporting service or develop tools that use it. Together, we can help reduce the amount of abuse on the Internet!