M3AAWG was formed almost ten years ago over concerns that email, one of the Internet’s two “killer apps” at the time, might collapse due to out-of-control volumes of spam. Fortunately today, even with vastly more spam bombarding the networks, our operator members report they’re now able to stop about 90 percent of abusive messages before they reach users’ inboxes, per our email metrics reporting program.

Over the past few years, and particularly these past six months, there’s been an uptick in abused systems and abusive clients taking up residence on systems in hosting and data centers. To expedite a community effort in remediating some of these attacks, we have launched a new M3AAWG Hosting SIG with these initial activities:

The idea of informing network owners’ abuse departments about malicious incidents is not new, but still a very effective and the most inexpensive way of letting people in charge know that there is something wrong in their own network (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2142.txt).  Actually, it is one of the best methods to help enforce security on the Internet in a self-regulating way.