Reporting internet abuse is not just a necessity but a collective responsibility. That’s where our Global Reporting service steps in, offering a free, streamlined solution for anyone to report abuse directly to the responsible network’s abuse desk for prompt action. In this article, we will take you through the what, why, and how of Global Reporting, exploring the critical importance of abuse reporting in maintaining the internet’s integrity and how our service simplifies this task through an advanced API.

What?

Global Reporting is our FREE Abuse Reporting service allowing anyone to report abuse back to the abuse desk of the responsible network to get it taken down.

Why?

Reporting abuse is critical to the proper functioning of the internet, however, Abuse Reporting isn’t easy, and providing reports in a machine-readable format is critical to getting this data into abuse handling systems so they can be aggregated with other reports and actioned quickly.

We make the whole process much simpler for you with our API, reporting these incidents on your behalf, reducing the amount of abuse that you receive, and helping the entire internet at the same time.

How?

All you need to do is sign up on our portal and set up a Data Channel for reporting abuse, we’ll provide you with the API endpoint and API Key. Then submit each abuse event to us with the mandatory fields necessary for the type of abuse you are reporting and we’ll generate an abuse report with machine-readable XARF attached and send it to the correct abuse desk on your behalf.

Details

Generating manual abuse reports with unstructured data takes a lot of time and is unlikely to be actioned in a timely manner as it will require a human to read and handle it. If any data is missing, they’ll need to send a follow up asking for more information, further delaying any action.

So, in order for Abuse Reports to be useful and actionable by the responsible abuse desk, they must contain the report in a machine readable format as well as some human readable detail. This also allows reports from other reporters for the same abuse to be automatically aggregated together, thereby increasing the overall confidence of the reports legitimacy and importance.

To that end, Abusix developed the open XARF format for abuse reporting which we package into all Abuse Reports that we send.

Global reporting also allows us to track how many reports we’re sending to each network overall and will allow us to provide a “Network Ranking” of each in the future.

To get started, you’ll need to sign-up and create an account at https://app.abusix.com, then follow this guide to set-up a Data Channel: https://abusix.com/docs/report-abusive-behavior-to-abusix/

You can find code examples here: https://github.com/abusix/global-reporting

Once you are ready to start reporting or if you have any questions, please contact [email protected] and we’ll be happy to help.