> On Fri, Jun 05, 2026 at 10:31:10AM -0700, Randolf Richardson, Postmaster via 
> mailop wrote:
> > > 64.62.197.0/24 shadowserver.org
> > 
> >     We don't currently block anything from this netblock.
> 
> NB: shadowserver is a white hat network scanner that freely offers up its'
> results to an ASN that wants to subscribe to their ASN's reports.
> 
> I think they do good work, and can alert you to unexpected anomalies that pop 
> up
> in your network that you should investigate.

That's excellent, and I appreciate you vouching for them.  I'm glad 
they're responsible operators, and we've seen nothing from them that 
causes me any concern -- from what I can see, they appear to be good 
actors who are trying to be helpful.

> There's plenty of shadow network scanners working for the hackers.

My approach is to not assume until I've seen actual bad/abuseive 
behaviour from a network.  I'll start with an individual IP address, 
and if things spread out from there, eventually expand -- if they 
keep pushing with enough whack-a-mole tactics then I'll just excise 
their entire netblock instead of wasting time trying to figure which 
of their IPs are the problem (I've got better things to do like 
flossing my teeth, counting weeds in the garden, trolling some idiots 
on Twitter, trying to get Google Translate to understand my 
neighbour's cat who meows a lot, etc.).

I know other adminsitrators who add such networks to their 
block-and-forget lists, and it's an approach that's been around since 
"the before time" (c. 1990s for those who aren't familiar with this 
South Park reference).

This is why it's important to check up on IP addresses/netblocks that 
are new to your networks before utilizing them, for if there's bad 
history then it can be a major hassle getting tarpits paved over, 
/dev/null routing errors fixed, and other related matters sorted out.

I recall two instances where I removed netblocks from my 
block-and-forget lists because ownership had changed, but I put them 
on a watchlist for a while and hobbled their IP addresses with an 
arbitrarily higher spam score for the first year -- neither of them 
sent any spam or tried to hack into anything (if they had, I would 
have assumed that ownership changed in name only, and put them back 
into my block-and-forget lists).  I exempt our NOC/Postmaster/Abuse 
accounts from DNSBLs and my block-and-forget lists for this reason (I 
don't know how common it is for other postmasters to do this, but I 
suspect that I'm not the only one).

-- 
Postmaster - [email protected]
Randolf Richardson, CNA - [email protected]
Inter-Corporate Computer & Network Services, Inc.
Vancouver, Beautiful British Columbia, Canada
https://www.inter-corporate.com/


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