I saw that a bunch of spam was being attempted from Digital Ocean IP 128.199.173.75, which is a mail server using the domain bpm-ph[.]com. I made an abuse complaint to Digital Ocean, but also thought I'd make one to the domain registrar, which is 101domain[.]com, which has an abuse reporting page. The abuse reporting page seems designed to prevent abuse complaints from getting through -- first, it won't allow text files as evidence attachments, which was easily bypassed by just renaming the text file to a doc file. Second, though, it asks for a contact email address, but it then turns the entire complaint into an email and sends it from the webserver, where it promptly bounces back to the sender if the contact domain is responsibly using DMARC. If you try emailing their abuse address directly, that produces an auto-response that tells you to use the web form. My solution was to use their abuse address as my contact address. It may get bounced, but at least the bounce will go to the right place.
@lippard co-wrote a report on WHOIS and anti-abuse two years ago; saw similar stories many times in the qualitative / open-ended responses to our survey. Seems the strategies to avoid acting on abuse haven’t changed much.
@Lbw Digital Ocean has sent me a response (currently caught in greylisting, should come through momentarily), but I see that the IP is still busy trying to spam with the same content as of a few minutes ago.
@lippard Sorry, I was a bit unclear. I was talking mainly to the DNS side of things, we didn’t look at Hosters. However: Doesn’t look like too bad a response time from DO — assuming it’s more than an automated notice.
@Lbw Was that report part of the efforts on WHOIS accessibility and data protection at ICANN?
@lippard here’s the link: https://docs.apwg.org/reports/M3AAWG_APWG_WHOIS_User_Survey_Report_2021.pdf I was part of the 2nd Stability, security, resilience review (not part of the org, with people selected by community stakeholders) before that report was written — but this wasn’t sponsored by ICANN.