At one place I worked at abuse@, webmaster@, hostmaster@, and all other generic addresses where aliases on the level 1 helpdesk mailbox.  Since the L1 desk's address was plastered all over the public site, they already had the pleasure of dealing with tons of spam and clueless users.  In the event that someone had a legit network complaint, they would open a ticket and forward to the appropriate group. 
 
The only down side was the additional training.  The most time consuming component was we needed to train the L1 staff how to read email headers and determine if the originated from our network.   
 
Hope that helps,
Adam Stasiniewicz

From: owner-nanog@merit.edu on behalf of K K
Sent: Fri 5/11/2007 5:10 PM
To: nanog@merit.edu
Subject: Re: Best practices for abuse@ mailbox and network abuse complaint handling?


The issue I see with most of the options (abuse.net, spamcop, etc)  is
they're focused on the spam problem, while my department is made up of
network operations, information security, and CERT, anything to do
with web servers, domains, and SMTP is handled by a different business
unit in another state entirely.

While 99.99% of our abuse@ mail is either spam or complaints about
spoofed spam forging our domains as the source and has nothing to do
with network operations, about once a month something truly network
related will come into that mailbox, and my team won't be alerted to
these events in a timely manner.  Only fix I can see right now is for
us to make it part of our daily workload to troll the abuse@ mailbox
on the off chance that something in there is relevant to network
operations/security/CERT.  Is this what other NANOs do?

The clueful victims will look up our ASN/ARIN records and eventually
make the right phone call -- or report the problem to law enforcement,
who definitely know how to reach us ;)

I'm hoping to find either a better and widely accepted way to handle
non-spam-related network abuse complaints (hacking, DoS, etc), or at
least best practices for triage on the huge volume of mail that comes
into abuse@,  procedures such that the rare legitimate complaint about
non-spam network abuse can be routed to my team in a timely manner.


Thanks,

 Kevin