Spam reporting has the ability to change the way your abuse team handles the safety and security of your hosting or internet service provider, domain owners, financial institutions, and more. There are a lot of ways to use the reporting and this will allow you to stay in control of the security more efficiently and effectively.
See also: 14 Best Practices for Adequately Protecting Your Network
1. Illuminate Blind Spots
There may be various blind spots within your network, and the spam reports have the ability to illuminate these. If there are security blind spots, you will want to work on improving them so that they do not continue to be a problem for you.
The problem truly lies in the fact that many administrators are not aware of the issues. They do not see the blind spots, and therefore issues will continuously occur. This puts more stress on the abuse team and the workload is not going to decrease until the blind spots are identified and dealt with appropriately.
Blind spots can take place within filters, spam ware, mail server ports, and more. There may even be the need to have a third party come in and conduct a security test in order to identify additional flaws and blind spots.
2. Identify Spam
It is important to be able to identify spam appropriately. More phishing sites are getting creative in terms of how they send emails so that they can float by the various spam filters and go undetected. This can lead to all sorts of cybercrime as well as data compromises.
When you have the ability to effectively identify spam, you can strengthen filters and uphold a higher level of data standards as a way of reducing cybercrime and providing better benefits to those who work around you.
You will have the ability to analyze the spam as well and potentially identify the source. This can help to eliminate problems from occurring in the future. Often, there may be one person responsible for multiple levels of spam, especially the phishing sites that request personal financial information.
Once spam is identified, those within your organization can be notified. It may require additional training. It is also possible to send out an email to any customers or clients that could be subject to spam. This level of communication demonstrates that you are on top of everything and that you are doing your best in order to reduce the likelihood of anyone encountering spam and the negative impact that it could ultimately have.
See also: Developing Your Abuse Handling Solution: Build Or Buy?
3. Forewarn System Administrators
When you obtain spam reports, you have the ability to forewarn your system administrators of any future threats. The goal should always be to stay on top of issues and learn about trends early on in order to tighten up any security flaws that may be in place. When system administrators are aware of spam, it will be easier to control issues.
Once a system administrator is aware of spam, they can work to control it. This may include monitoring mail server logs, implementing checks, identifying the validity of sender addresses, and potentially providing filters for individual users.
Ultimately, it comes down to needing to deal with spammers promptly. Some people don’t realize that they are spamming, while there are others that are completely uneducated will and will spam regardless of how many times they are told not to. When spamming is done on the inside, they need to be terminated immediately, though the only way for this to happen is to let system administrators know what is going on so that threats can be dealt with as quickly as possible.
If you are ready to start identifying network abuse at the source and are looking for an efficient plan to organize and utilize spam reports, talk to our team to see what AbuseHQ could do for your organization.
