ABUSIX

The abusix Project was founded in September 2008 by a group of Internet Security, Abuse Handling and Fraud Specialists.

The idea behind the initial version of the project was to make internet abuse visible to the responsible persons, not with another fancy graphical website nobody is looking at. We wanted to change things by actively contacting network operators and report abusive behavior to them directly. “The Global Reporting Project“ was born.

We started to use our huge spam trap network and began to generate MARF (Message Abuse Reporting Format) reports. Finding the right abuse contact in whois information was the biggest challenge we had to face. Therefore we started to publish our own “Abuse Contact Database” in the very beginning of 2009 for free. The intent of this database was to offer a temporary solution, until RIRs (Regional Internet Registries) start to offer their internal solution. RIPE made the first step and started the AbuseFinder Tool.

Our opinion got more important when we started to work in several boards and committees and started to change things in the “Internet Community” it self, by for example suggest policy proposals for APNIC, AfriNIC or RIPE.

Understanding that spam is a huge issue, but realizing that further information is as valuable as spam reports to network operators, we helped starting the “x-arf” community, which works with a more flexible format for network abuse reporting than the well known MARF (Message Abuse Reporting Format) does.