Taking steps to end traffic from abusive cloud providers

Published on , 131 words, 1 minutes to read

This blog post explains how to effectively file abuse reports against cloud providers to stop malicious traffic. Key points:

  1. Two IP Types: Residential (ineffective to report) vs. Commercial (targeted reports)

  2. Why Cloud Providers: Cloud customers violate provider terms, making abuse reports actionable

  3. Effective Abuse Reports Should Include:

    • Time of abusive requests
    • IP/User-Agent identifiers
    • robots.txt status
    • System impact description
    • Service context

  4. Process:

    • Use whois to find abuse contacts (look for "abuse-c" or "abuse-mailbox")
    • Send detailed reports with all listed emails
    • Expect response within 2 business days

  5. Note on "Free VPNs": Often sell your bandwidth as part of botnets, not true public infrastructure

The goal is to make scraping the cloud provider's problem, forcing them to address violations against their terms of service.

Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.

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