How Do I Deal With An Abuse Report?

If a third party believes that any illegal, malicious or fraudulent activity is taking place on a server within our network, they are able to raise an Abuse Report through our MyServers control panel, against the offending IP address(es). If an Abuse ticket is raised against your account, you must resolve the issue outlined in the ticket by removing the offending material, then respond to abuse ticket to let the complainant know this has been resolved.

If an Abuse Ticket is raised against your account, you should first log in to your MyServers account and then open the abuse ticket. Any open abuse tickets will appear on the My Account tab of MyServers. Please note that on some occasions multiple abuse tickets can be opened against a client account at once and multiple abuse tickets can be opened about the same issue. If this is the case, you must deal with and respond to every abuse ticket. Failure to do so will leave you at risk of suspension. To open an Abuse Ticket, click on the ticket’s reference number.

Once you have opened up the abuse ticket, you will be presented with the details inputted by the claimant. These include the IP address linked to the malicious/fraudulent activity, the type of abuse, the details of the reported malicious/fraudulent activity, any linked domain and a description of the malicious/fraudulent activity. You will also be able to see when the abuse ticket was opened, the server it is linked to and the current status of the abuse ticket. Please see below for an example; which outlines a report of copyright infringement.

If an abuse ticket has been raised against your account, you must take appropriate action to resolve the issues outlined in the abuse ticket, within a reasonable time frame. Please note the ‘reasonable time frame’ given depends on the seriousness of the reported activity and if any legal action have or will be taken by the complainant.

How you resolve the issue(s) outlined in the abuse report is up to you. Some examples of how our clients have dealt with reports of abuse on their devices include:

• Re-installing the server’s/VM’s operating system

• Removal of the individual offending content

• Suspending the server/VM until the content is removed

We can assist in certain ways of dealing with abusive content, by re-installing an operating systems or suspending a host device, so if you do require assistance in one of these two ways please feel to raise a support ticket.

While dealing with an abuse report and removing any offending content, you must also reply to the abuse ticket. Under the section which outlines the details of the reported abuse, there is a section for you to reply to the abuse ticket. You can use this section to respond to the complainant. Please note that the abuse ticket and this response section is to be used to communicate with the complainant only, not our support or abuse teams.

There are three set type of responses you can add to an abuse ticket. Please see below a description of each type of response and when you should use them.

Will be Resolved

You should use the ‘Will be Resolved’ response when you have yet to resolve the issue, but you do intend to resolve the issue as soon as possible. You should use this response type to keep the complainant updated on your progress, if the issue cannot immediately be fixed. It is good practice once you have read the details of the abuse ticket and acknowledge the abuse report has been correctly assigned to one of your devices, to reply to the ticket using the ‘Will be Resolved’ response stating that you have acknowledged the abuse report and that you will investigate the issue. You should use the ‘Further Details’ box to add a message to your response.

Resolved

The ‘Resolved’ response should only be used once you have completely dealt with the issues raised in the abuse report. Once you have 100% dealt with the issue outlined in the abuse report, you must use the resolved response to update the abuse ticket, to inform the complainant that you have dealt with the issue. Once you have dealt with the issue and are inputting a response to show you have done so, you must enter how you resolved the issue (e.g. re-installed the VM to remove the offending content) and how you plan to stop this issue occurring in future (e.g. you have suspended the client and warned them not to do this in future). When you enter a ‘Resolved’ response, the abuse ticket will be passed back to the complainant to review.

Incorrectly Assigned to me

The ‘Incorrectly Assigned to me’ response is used when you believe that the abuse report has be in-correctly assigned to yourselves. If you believe that an abuse ticket has been wrongly assigned to you, you can use this response to pass the ticket back to the complainant, informing them that this is the case. You must make it very clear, using the further details section, why you believe the abuse report has wrongly been assigned to you. Please note that if the abusive behaviour/content is being hosted on a device linked to your account - even if it is one of your own clients actually performing the illegal/fraudulent/malicious activity on one of your devices, if your device has been hacked and the content has been added to your device without your knowledge/permission, or if the device’s hosted content is managed by a third part, etc. - it is still your responsibility as our client to resolve the abuse report. If you use the ‘Incorrectly Assigned to me’ response, the ticket will be passed back to the complainant to review.

Once you have replied to the abuse ticket, setting the response to either ‘Resolved’ or ‘Incorrectly Assigned to me’, the ticket and your reply will be emailed to the original complainant, for them to review. The complainant should then review your reply; then either ensure the offending activity has ceased or check if they wrongly assigned to abuse to your client account. The original complainant can then proceed in one of three ways:

1. The complainant reviews your response, sees that you have taken appropriate action and closes the ticket.

2. The complainant does not reply or close the abuse ticket. This is normally interpreted as they have accepted the content has been removed. The ticket will automatically be closed after 3 days and the matter is considered closed.

3. The complainant reviews your response, and does not feel the matter has been satisfactorily resolved and escalates this up to our abuse department. Our abuse team will then get in touch with you to determine the appropriate course of action.

In the case of instance one and two, the abuse case has been resolved successfully and our abuse team will take no action. In the case of instance three, you will have to continue to try and resolve the issue, until the case has been resolved. Please make sure you are always updating the abuse ticket throughout this process.

If you have any further questions about our abuse report ticketing system, feel free to raise a separate ticket with our support team, and we will be happy to help.