The Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG) is a global nonprofit organization founded to develop effective models and solutions to combat online abuse such as phishing, botnets, fraud, spam, viruses and denial-of-service attacks that can cause great harm to both individual and national economies. M3AAWG includes technical experts, researchers and policy specialists from a broad base of Internet service providers and network operators representing over one billion email accounts, and from key technology providers, academia and volume messaging sender organizations

 

M3AAWG supports RIPE’s proposal to introduce a new contact attribute named "abuse-c:", which can be included in inetnum, inet6num and aut-num objects (https://www.ripe.net/ripe/policies/proposals/2011-06). 

 

The investigation and prosecution of criminal activity and abuse on the Internet would be greatly facilitated by the availability of such data being included in WHOIS.  The proliferation of spam and the transmission of malware of all types, which are the fundamental target of the work undertaken by M3AAWG and its members, are the most common and serious types of privacy intrusions, occurring billions of times a day, worldwide.

 

ARIN Draft Policy “Abuse Contact Management in the RIPE NCC Database” states “abuse-c … provides a more efficient way for maintainers to organize their provided information and helps to increase accuracy and efficiency in routing abuse reports to the correct network contact. In addition, it helps all kinds of institutions to find the correct abuse contact information more easily.”

 

For anti-abuse researchers, investigators and systems operators, WHOIS and a publicly available point of intercept identifying an abuse contact is essential and fundamental information. People who manage abuse of their networks need to easily, readily and accurately identify all entities on a given network.  Therefore, M3AAWG firmly supports the adoption of the RIPE Draft Policy “Abuse Contact Management in the RIPE NCC Database.”

 

Sincerely,

Jerry Upton, Executive Director

Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG)

jerry.upton@m3aawg.org

http://www.m3aawg.org