Selfhosted

I’ve actually done this for a Microsoft owned IP before. Someone was Wordpress-scanning a particularly fragile application of one of my clients (which was not Wordpress) which was causing it to fall over. The scan stopped within an hour of sending the abuse email.

Edit to add: I used to work in a NOC for a tier 1 ISP. We had an “abuse department” (a couple people) that investigated these and opened tickets with the NOC. I’ve emailed customers and disconnected circuits as a result of abuse emails, so I wouldn’t say they’re totally useless, but I’m sure it depends on the company involved.

About 20 years ago I was running a phpnuke site on my home server and had someone doing the same thing as you describe. Hundreds of attempts over and over all night long. I went through the logs and saw it was someone on intelsat (I think, it's been a long time) internet from Africa. I called intelsat or whoever the company was and talked to their system admin that was on call. Within 20 mins of getting off the phone the attack stopped and never happened again. They guy I talked to was really nice and seemed like he was happy to be able to help me.

I have in the past, yes. Reputable hosts and cloud providers tend to take them seriously in my experience.

Yea, I have submitted multiple abuse emails with details to domain registrars for scamming and phishing.

Didn’t receive any update from them on any action taken yet.

I've tried to deal with several vendors regarding abusive domains and it's pretty terrible in general. Everything is a webform with a generic responder - if any at all - and then weeks or months or nothing. Even domains impersonating proper commercial entities.

• GoDaddy: here's the real domain, now here's the domain registered via you, cloned from the real domain (including text, corporate logos, etc with some additional chinese crap) and being used for phishing/scams. Their response: "fill out this bullshit form that goes nowhere"
• CloudFlare: "uh, we don't actually host the site (just the DNS and "protection" service that hides who does) sorry" Google: "we'll continue showing the scam/phishing domain in top search results after your reports because apparently accurate search results aren't actually our thing"

I did try to automate abuse emails via fail2ban, but that ended up getting my entire domain removed because it generated so many emails

It depends how vindictive I'm feeling and how blatant/annoying the abuse is. In some cases it is easier to just block the IP and move on. When I do I have gotten mixed results. AWS and Google (usually reporting gmail spammers) are usually pretty responsive.

+1 for send it. I’ve only had one in 5 ignored. You can kind of guess who’s going to ignore it if you look at the website of the tld you’re emailing.

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.

I've done it a couple times. Based on what I'm reading from other users, I guess I got lucky with one, because I got back a personal response thanking me and assuring the abusive whatever was dealt with.

I did it in a security incident last year. It took down attacker command and control infrastructure, hindering their operations not just against my company but half a dozen others which had made the news. I found out later about the others on Twitter. After that I became much more positive about the worth of abuse reports.

I treat it like free data to train my firewall on. It's just a fact of being on the Internet, endless bots scanning everything. Not worth your time, it's endless whack-a-mole. They'll just keep coming.

At work, I have a bot that bans an IP every couple minutes for common attacks and scans, it's wild.

I work at a mid-size ISP. Abuse emails are getting looking at. However, please include relevant details in your messages. Many emails simply say "stop what you're doing" without any specifics, even attack source IP.

Yeah, I’ve sent one to like, limestone network maybe? Or some other similar host. They responded within a few hours and the scans stopped from their IPs for a long time. Just provide logs of whatever you see. The NOC will be able to confirm or deny pretty quickly and take appropriate action.

This video from thiojoe is probably relevant here. It is mostly for scam websites, but maybe it's useful for this too? At least gives you some platforms to contact

I've tried to deal with several vendors regarding abusive domains and it's pretty terrible in general. Everything is a webform with a generic responder - if any at all - and then weeks or months or nothing. Even domains impersonating proper commercial entities.

• GoDaddy: here's the real domain, now here's the domain registered via you, cloned from the real domain (including text, corporate logos, etc with some additional chinese crap) and being used for phishing/scams. Their response: "fill out this bullshit form that goes nowhere"
• CloudFlare: "uh, we don't actually host the site (just the DNS and "protection" service that hides who does) sorry" Google: "we'll continue showing the scam/phishing domain in top search results after your reports because apparently accurate search results aren't actually our thing"

I've tried to deal with several vendors regarding abusive domains and it's pretty terrible in general. Everything is a webform with a generic responder - if any at all - and then weeks or months or nothing. Even domains impersonating proper commercial entities.

• GoDaddy: here's the real domain, now here's the domain registered via you, cloned from the real domain (including text, corporate logos, etc with some additional chinese crap) and being used for phishing/scams. Their response: "fill out this bullshit form that goes nowhere"
• CloudFlare: "uh, we don't actually host the site (just the DNS and "protection" service that hides who does) sorry" Google: "we'll continue showing the scam/phishing domain in top search results after your reports because apparently accurate search results aren't actually our thing"