I’ve always been a strong believer that good behaviour and a clean internet would lead to a better experience for everyone.
There is a lot of nasty stuff out there and we’ve always tried to do what we can to stop it from affecting our clients.
Unfortunately “network abuse” is not “sexy” or exciting and a lot of hosting providers have weak or non-existent policies. Running an abuse desk isn’t exciting and won’t directly help boost sales, though I would argue that it does actually bring you benefits if you adopt a broader approach. (If you’re bored you can peruse my slides from the RIPE meeting in Rome last year)
Our technical team have developed a range of tools and internal policies to deal with issues when they occur on our network and we’ve been subscribed to Google’s Safe Browsing Alerts since last year.
I’ve also been keeping a close eye on what was going on with StopBadWare (the name says it all) who had been working on developing a set of best practices for hosting providers.
When they announce the launch of “We Stop Badware” we had to signup and our currently one of only 6 companies worldwide that have signed up.
So now we can display the nice little logo:
Is this going to change anything in how we treat network abuse?
Not really, though it does help strengthen our current policies and processes.