Dear all, please discuss and comment to following draft proposal ... (and please forgive but correct my english, bad formatting or terms) Kind regards, Frank -------------------------------------------------------------- DRAFT: implementation of an abuse monitor system (draft RIPE proposal) Abstract This document describes the implementation of an abuse monitor system at RIPE NCC. Its intention is to ensure working abuse contacts on the members side and to improve the awareness, responsiveness and work flow for abuse reports for the reporting (and abused) internet users and the RIPE members (owning the misused services). Contents 1. Introduction 2. Goals of an abuse monitor system 3. Requirements 4. Description 5. Advantages 6. Disadvantages 7. Enhancements 8. Outlook 1. Introduction Taking in account the amount of spam and other abuse currently happening every day, there is a need to ensure that ISPs and other organisations are aware of the problem their customers and end users can cause for others. The current procedure of having non-mandatory abuse contacts in whois output is causing several problems for the incident reporting side as well as for the receiver. RIPEs member should be responsible for the abuse their customers cause, like this is enforced by law in many countries already. 2. Goals of an abuse monitor system Currently most abuse contact addresses are hidden in whois output remark fields in several non-standarized ways or do not even exist, because the real abuse-field is non-mandatory. There should be a standarized method how to contact responsible people to send abuse reports too. It should be possible to to send abuse reports to a standarized email address, because whois queries are limited. The system should bypass whois queries, so that reports can be automated. Currently there is no control, if existing abuse contacts are still valid, working or incoming emails are beeing read. The real abuse email address of any RIPE member should be hidden by the abuse monitor system. Finally a monitoring system should be able to messure the amount of incoming reports for any RIPE member. This will enable RIPE NCC to help members to become more aware of security breakouts or help members that are not aware of the problems they cause. RIPE NCC could e.g. arrange for security training cources and invite members with a very high reporting rate according to the amount of allocated IP addresses. 3. Requirements RIPE NCC should enhance the member section with an extra abuse contact field. This field should be filled at startup with the main email address of any member automatically, but should be editable for the members. 4. Description RIPE NCC should implement a mailserver able to receive emails in the form of IP1.IP2.IP3.IP4@abuse.ripe.net (example) Incoming emails to these addresses can be treated as incoming abuse reports and will be forwarded to the members internal abuse contact address (non-public), after the mailserver finds the correct member by looking up internal allocation tables. The amount of incoming emails for every member will be logged and should create internal statistics for RIPE NCCs internal usage. Their should be no anti spam systems implemented on this server to ensure that every incoming email gets forwarded. Anti spam systems should be up to the member. Furthermore, RIPE NCC should monitor, if the members abuse contact address generates errors, bounces or other problems like "User unknown" or "Mailbox full". If the members abuse contact address is not valid anymore, it could be reset to the members hidden main email address, and the member could be informed about the problem in other ways (letter, phone call aso). 5. Advantages The system does neither have to define or decide what spam or abuse is, because it only forwards abuse reports to the responsible person. It is likely that any incoming email is a description of a real abusive problem (except incoming spam). The described system would make it very easy for any ISP or private person to report received spam, hacks or other abuses directly to the responsible RIPE member, without having to know its name and without having to know how to use whois. Reporting systems could be easily automated without having to query whois. The ISP or RIPE member can easily change and control his internal abuse contact address without having to update several objects in RIPEs database. RIPE NCC can ensure that all alocations have a working abuse address. This all can ensure that incidents are really reported by the abused users (and not beeing ignored or forgotten because its to much work to report incidents) and that reports will be read by the right and responsible person. This will finally increase the awareness of any RIPE member about the problems his end users or misused servers may cause and will hopefully force any member to implement methods to monitor there own servers and/or dialin users to improve the detection of misused services. This will hopefully reduce the amount of spams and abuse worldwide. Finally this will maybe influence other RIRs to implement similar systems. 6. Disadvantages It is likely that spammer will misuse the new general abuse adresses massively. Anti spam methos needs to be implemented at the members side. 7. Enhancements The system could be enhanced with addtional services easily on RIPE NCCs side, after implementation and a test period of the system. More detailed statistics could help improving the awareness at the members side. Enhancing forwarded abuse report with an feedback link could help to categorize incoming reports. Members could then visit a ticket system to back report incoming reports as "spam", "incident" or "wrong report" (like popular spam blacklist like SpamCop are doing this already), add comments like "missing information", "incident currently under investigation" or "incident solved". This could help members to track reports and incident easily without having to implement a own system (what could be very interesting for smaller ISPs). Finally this would allow the reporting internet user to receive feedback to ensure that his input is valuable, important and taking care off. 8. Outlook Standarization of a general abuse address will be another step to the standarization of an abuse report format, wich are currently in process. This could lead to open source implemantations of spam detection solutions that include standarized reporting features. Standarized reporting could also be included in other monitoring and detection software, like Intrusion Detection Systems or Antispam Solutions. Author: Frank Gadegast Company: PHADE Software - PowerWeb Contact: frank@powerweb.de Version: 0.1 Date: 08.04.2010