MAAWG and Tucows’ commitment to combating abuse
Last week a a number of members of the Tucows abuse and compliance teams were in San Francisco to take part in the 12th General Meeting of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG).
MAAWG brings the messaging industry together to work together to combat things like spam, virus attacks, denial-of-service attacks and other forms of abuse. Tucows is a supporting member of MAAWG and is committed to working with the MAAWG community to tackle the important issue of messaging abuse.
I sat down with Garrick Lau, who is responsible for IT Security and Compliance at Tucows, to talk about MAAWG, what we learned at the Meetings, and what Tucows is doing to combat abuse across its platforms and services.
Garrick explained that abuse continues to be a significant problem worldwide. While spam appears at the surface to be a nuisance, at its core it is a very serious issue. Criminal groups use spam and phishing attacks to steal identities and money, and perpetrate all manner of fraud against unsuspecting victims.
Earlier this month, ICANN pointed to Asia, and China as a substantial growth area for the Internet. Not surprisingly, Garrick tells me that China is home to the most bot infected computers on the planet (about 29% of bot-infected computers worldwide, according to Symantec). In terms of numbers, spam continues to hover in the 80% - 90% of overall email traffic on the Internet. Malware continues to rise - up by 25% of late. In short, abuse is getting worse and will likely continue to do so as the barrier to entry for those looking to get involved is almost non-existent.
MAAWG has been trying to get Registrars involved for some time and we’re happy to step up to the plate to play our part in combating abuse where and when we can. Garrick says this commitment was met with appreciation from other MAAWG members and he’s pleased with the valuable support and input that’s already been sent his way.
One of the tasks Garrick and our abuse staff undertook was to rewrite and formalize an email anti-abuse policy. You’ll find that policy and a number of others linked from the footer of our websites. Tucows is also looking at measures like Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) and considering email authentication and its implementation across our email and domains platforms.
Being a part of MAAWG gives us a voice in this important issue. But even more valuable is that it gives us access to the invaluable experiences and insights of other MAAWG members. As we are within ICANN as it relates to domain and Internet policy, we’re excited to do our part as an active participant in MAAWG.
