I was logged into my Cloudflare account today attempting to setup Tunnels when I noticed various security events related to my domain. Upon further inspection I realized that they all originated from a Microsoft Owned IP address (I’m assuming somebody running a Azure VM instance).

Looking into the actual request headers I can see that whatever bot was running was looking for common PHP exploits or unsecured endpoints.

I usually ignore such instances as I have proper firewall rules both on the Cloudflare side as well as my local network side so I’m doubting there’s actually any threat to my network. However, I decided today to email the abuse contact provided from the WHOIS details. Was wondering if anybody else had experience with writing these? Is it even worth writing them or do they just end up being a waste of time?

Edit: Thanks everybody for the responses! Seems that it’s up in the air if I’ll ever get a response back. Maybe that’s okay - Looks like the general consensus is that these usually do end up getting taken seriously (at least by some providers). I guess I’ll keep composing away even if it’s just an exercise in good internet stewardship :)

  • @[email protected]English
    2•1 year ago

    I actually do side work for a nonprofit that provides free web hosting. At least with my organization, sending an abuse report will get the user’s account suspended until they can look at it. If what they were doing was blatantly illegal (e.g. a phishing site), they just get banned entirely. I’m one of 2 or 3 people who deals with the reports.

    On the other side as someone sending reports, I can say that some companies care more than others. I’ve had success getting abuse taken down from 1&1, Hostinger, and Microsoft. That said, I’ve had GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, and a few others ignore abuse reports entirely, and I had Weebly actively refuse to remove a phishing site.

    My experience is that hosting companies tends to be more responsive than domain registrars at getting abuse removed, if you can figure out who is hosting the content behind the domain. The annoying part is that most just use cloudflare these days to hide the origin.