I was logged into my Cloudflare account today attempting to setup Tunnels when I noticed various security events related to my domain. Upon further inspection I realized that they all originated from a Microsoft Owned IP address (I’m assuming somebody running a Azure VM instance).
Looking into the actual request headers I can see that whatever bot was running was looking for common PHP exploits or unsecured endpoints.
I usually ignore such instances as I have proper firewall rules both on the Cloudflare side as well as my local network side so I’m doubting there’s actually any threat to my network. However, I decided today to email the abuse contact provided from the WHOIS details. Was wondering if anybody else had experience with writing these? Is it even worth writing them or do they just end up being a waste of time?
Edit: Thanks everybody for the responses! Seems that it’s up in the air if I’ll ever get a response back. Maybe that’s okay - Looks like the general consensus is that these usually do end up getting taken seriously (at least by some providers). I guess I’ll keep composing away even if it’s just an exercise in good internet stewardship :)
It depends how vindictive I’m feeling and how blatant/annoying the abuse is. In some cases it is easier to just block the IP for a month and move on. When I do I have gotten mixed results. AWS and Google (usually reporting gmail spammers) are usually pretty responsive.