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>Is it worth my time to email these abuse contacts and ask them to stop? Should I just ignore it? Should I block the IPs? Obviously not worth your time, unless

by prvit 4y ago

>Is it worth my time to email these abuse contacts and ask them to stop? Should I just ignore it? Should I block the IPs? Obviously not worth your time, unless your time is worth nothing, because that's exactly what you get in return. You will never receive any benefit whatsoever from emailing those abuse contacts. You should just ignore it, even blocking the IPs isn't worth the effort. >They fill up my access logs with noise that costs money to store and takes time to deal with. If your access logs cost meaningful amounts of money to store, you should address that issue. Storage costs something like $15 per TB, and you can safely assume around 6 years life expectancy. That's around $2.5 per year per terabyte of logs. There's no way this abusive traffic is costing you even a dollar in log storage unless you're doing something utterly stupid.

KMnO4 4y ago
> You will never receive any benefit whatsoever from emailing those abuse contacts. I disagree. That’s like saying theres no point donating $5 to charity because it’s not enough to fund research. The point is that if everyone reports the abusers, there will be fewer abusers in total, which directly impacts the amount of abuse you see on your end.
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  The “if I recycle, it’ll help” effect. Their point is that such things usually don’t work. In the same way that consumer recycling doesn’t affect climate change (or other laudable goal), everyone tomorrow could email about a specific IP, and it’s a tossup whether it’ll change that one IP, let alone the others.
- prvit 4y ago
  Your mistake is thinking that abuse reports you send can truly measurably reduce abuse. It’s not true! Any IP address you see in your logs has almost certainly already had a ton of automated abuse reports sent about it.
creeble 4y ago
Totally agree, although I do tend to accumulate and block ssh attempts just to lower the noise on systems (all key-only) that have a fair number of actual ssh users. I have never, ever received a return message from an abuse@ address, except the automated no-reply. About half the probes and brute-force attacks I get are from commercial VPS companies (looking at you, Digital Ocean). Send an abuse report to DO, I dare you. It’s a comical array of “your response will be ignored unless you use our abuse API”, which... is also ignored. Edit: vpn -> vps

by prvit 4y ago

KMnO4 4y ago

> You will never receive any benefit whatsoever from emailing those abuse contacts. I disagree. That’s like saying theres no point donating $5 to charity because it’s not enough to fund research. The point is that if everyone reports the abusers, there will be fewer abusers in total, which directly impacts the amount of abuse you see on your end.

sillysaurusx 4y ago
The “if I recycle, it’ll help” effect. Their point is that such things usually don’t work. In the same way that consumer recycling doesn’t affect climate change (or other laudable goal), everyone tomorrow could email about a specific IP, and it’s a tossup whether it’ll change that one IP, let alone the others.
prvit 4y ago
Your mistake is thinking that abuse reports you send can truly measurably reduce abuse. It’s not true! Any IP address you see in your logs has almost certainly already had a ton of automated abuse reports sent about it.

creeble 4y ago

Totally agree, although I do tend to accumulate and block ssh attempts just to lower the noise on systems (all key-only) that have a fair number of actual ssh users. I have never, ever received a return message from an abuse@ address, except the automated no-reply. About half the probes and brute-force attacks I get are from commercial VPS companies (looking at you, Digital Ocean). Send an abuse report to DO, I dare you. It’s a comical array of “your response will be ignored unless you use our abuse API”, which... is also ignored. Edit: vpn -> vps