Operating an ISP or hosting provider service isn’t easy in a world where cyber threats continue to increase and become hard to stop. Suddenly you start worrying about threats from within your network as well. But worrying is not solving these issues and you have already enough on your plate. So where do you start?
The inside abuse you face may come in the form of your subscribers sending spam, causing your ISP to be blacklisted. It may come from hackers using your subscribers’ computer and causing your infrastructure to take part in nefarious activities like DDoS attacks. Keeping up to speed is the most important rule. Your abuse desk managers know they’re not in for any picnic either, especially as they open their queue and see an onslaught of emails. As a result, it places your team into a quandary about how to manage their own schedule.
See also: Developing Your Abuse Handling Solution: Build Or Buy?
So how can abuse desk managers put the fun back into Friday night? They don’t have to work long hours and weekends to catch up on their queues when using the right technology.
The Ticketing System
You’ve likely used a ticketing system for years to organize abuse reports from users. Regardless, how many times has your abuse team been able to get this system to work well without causing unneeded pressures and stress?
Ticketing Systems are built to reflect the needs of customer care teams. It is a dialog, usually starting with a question by a customer and hopefully short back and forth that leads to an answer. Abuse handling is not even close to this type of process. Ticketing usually means organizing incidents based on high, medium, or low priority. This becomes more challenging when abuse desk managers can’t really aggregate and prioritize what abuse cases are truly serious or something not causing excessive harm.
The above is only going to require extraneous time to investigate each incident. Ultimately, your team may never find the really serious cases and just spend time-solving less important spam cases. In the end, it is a waste of valuable time for your abuse analysts and creates a lack of satisfaction in their jobs.
Attempting to Clear the Queue
Since your abuse desk managers can only address a certain percentage of incidents in a day, it places more pressure on them to address abuse complaints that look serious. For them, it means having to squeeze in more time to take care of each email they receive.
What this usually requires is working longer hours, including weekends, to get through each report. Since this potentially becomes more protracted each week, your abuse team probably never has much time off to do things for themselves.
See also: 14 Best Practices for Adequately Protecting Your Network
On a Friday night, when most people are out having fun, your team is possibly working late to investigate reports that may or may not have repercussions. Without any end to it all, how do you find a way for your abuse team to clear their schedules so they can have a normal weekend?
Finding a Way to Sort and Prioritize Abuse Reports
AbuseHQ is a platform that sorts and prioritizes abuse cases so abuse desk managers can go after the truly serious threats. Otherwise, they may have no ability to differentiate between minor issues and someone to run huge attacks abusing your network.
AbuseHQ takes all abuse cases and indicates which ones need addressing now. This means your abuse team can get rid of spam and any impending major threats before the week even ends. At last, they can finally put the fun back into Friday night, which is something they’ve maybe never experienced in their careers.
Learn more about AbuseHQ and how it’s changing the way ISP’s and hosting providers fight network attacks by downloading the free “Getting Started With AbuseHQ” guide.
