The Abusive Hosts Blocking List

As part of an overhaul, we've updated and made current our listing policies.  Not all that much has changed, but we've clarified some policies and expanded on others.

Just an FYI to all users, over the next few days, we'll be doing some upgrades to the servers.  Shiny new large hard drives, upgraded Xen software, and other good stuff.  If we are down at times, please be patient as these types of upgrades take time.

[ Update 7/27/2010 ]

Good news everyone! (I've always wanted to say that)

99% of the upgrades are already complete thanks to efficent and quick work, two days earlier then expected.  Please let us know of any website issues you may run into.

My name is Andrew D Kirch, I'm one of the founders of the AHBL, and served in that capacity until 2008.    I've been harassed, extorted, sued, and defamed by a Mr. Richard Morton Scoville, a resident of San Antonio, Texas for a period of 7 years.  During that time I have suffered nearly irreparable damage to my character, and public reputation.  I've been questioned by police, and my customers, and I have incurred over $10,000 in legal costs defending myself in court against this person.

SORBS has posted an excellent article in their Talkback blog relating to Escalated Listings.  The AHBL follows the same methodology and beliefs as SORBS on this matter - we tend to be extremely aggressive when it comes to ISPs and providers that know about abuse, but choose to ignore it.

It has come to our attention that GoDaddy Abuse Department has been responding to users complaints about our listing of their space with misinformation.

Unfortunately, the issue that caused the AHBL to list our IP space is based on a personal dispute between site owners, and is not actually tied to any spam or abuse situation.

This is an outright lie.  GoDaddy has had evidence for years that the user in question is a known spammer and uses abuse, harassment, and intimidation to conduct his 'business'.

The AHBL handles dozens of removal requests each day from people who have been listed in our database for one reason or another.  Some handle it professionally, while others go off the deep end.

You'll notice on our the SOSDG Wiki and in our Documents section here, we take great pride in posting messages from people who step over the line.  The people who go through the proper channels find that their requests are handled promptly and everyone leaves the table happy.

You may have noticed over the past week or two that we've been restoring old content from the pre-CMS AHBL website.  Much of it is in the Documents section of our website, and some of it is rather dated.  However, some things never change with the spammers/kooks.

Due to state sponsored hacking and espionage, we've implemented a policy of blocking all traffic to/from China's IP ranges at our core routers.  This block will remain in effect until China's government decides to grow up and play by the rules the rest of the world does.

If this creates a problem for you accessing our resources, then perhaps you might want to move to a less oppressive country.

Due to an increasing amount of spam from hosts with invalid reverse DNS, the AHBL has instituted a policy of listing IPs with obviously invalid reverse DNS that are seen spamming.

As an example, the AHBL has seen an increased amount of spam from 123.26.0.0/16, assigned to "Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications".  This entire range has reverse DNS of 'localhost' making it nearly impossible to identify what these hosts are (dynamic, static, servers, home users, etc).