For security engineers and administrators, the eternal balancing act between user experience and protection against abuse remains a top challenge. As Anubis developers recently highlighted, minimizing friction for legitimate users often means reducing security challenges—but this can inadvertently open floodgates for malicious scraping from cloud infrastructure. The solution? Precision-targeted abuse reports that force accountability at the source.

The IP Dichotomy: Where Reports Actually Matter

Not all abusive traffic deserves equal attention. As the Anubis team emphasizes, effective defense requires understanding two distinct IP categories:

  • Residential IPs: Dynamically assigned to home users, often behind CGNAT. Reporting abuse here rarely yields results since the actual user may be unaware their device is compromised (e.g., by "free VPN" malware botnets).
  • Commercial IPs: Statically assigned to cloud/VPS providers. These are prime targets for abuse reports since the customer violates the provider's AUP, enabling swift contractual enforcement.

"Filing abuse reports to residential IPs is a waste of time... What you should really focus on is traffic from commercial IP addresses. That’s where contractual violence comes into play," notes the Anubis team.

Crafting the Kill Shot: Anatomy of an Effective Abuse Report

Vague complaints get ignored. Actionable reports contain:

  1. Timestamped evidence: Exact times of abusive requests
  2. Digital fingerprints: IPs, User-Agents, and behavioral markers (e.g., ignoring robots.txt)
  3. Impact analysis: Quantifiable harm like server crashes, downtime, or resource exhaustion
  4. Service context: Why your platform matters and how the attack undermines it

The Gold-Standard Example:

Hello,

On or about Thursday, October 30th at 04:00 UTC, traffic from 127.34.0.0/24 targeted /admin/ routes, causing PostgreSQL crashes and 3-hour downtime. This impacted 353 legitimate users. Attached logs show:

- No robots.txt requests
- Patterns consistent with credential stuffing

We've temporarily blocked the range. Request immediate action per your AUP.

Sincerely,
[Admin]

Weaponizing WHOIS: Finding the Right Triggers

Locating abuse contacts is a terminal one-liner:

whois 1.1.1.1 | grep -i "abuse"

Target fields: abuse-c or abuse-mailbox. The Anubis team advises emailing all listed addresses for maximum impact. Expect responses within 48 hours—if silence follows, escalate.

Why This Changes the Game

Most cloud providers underestimate scraping's systemic damage. Well-crafted reports transform your problem into their problem, leveraging legal and contractual pressure most attackers can't ignore. By surgically targeting commercial IPs and documenting harm, administrators gain a potent tool that complements technical defenses like WAFs.

Source: Anubis Blog