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abusectl

Abuse reporting for phishing mail. Parses a flagged message, extracts its indicators, resolves who to report each one to, and files the result to a MISP instance and to public abuse channels.

Status: init, parse and contacts are built. The rest of the pipeline is designed but not written, see docs/specs/2026-09-08-abusectl-design.md. Nothing here submits anything to anyone yet.

What it does

abusectl init                 # asks, writes ~/.config/abusectl/config.toml
abusectl parse msg.eml        # -> case directory, IOCs      offline
abusectl contacts <case>      # + abuse contacts via RDAP    network, read-only
abusectl report <case>        # + report bodies              offline
      # review the bodies, by hand or in a mail client
abusectl submit <case>        # MISP, then the vendors       network, writes
abusectl retry                # whatever is due              cron

init, parse and contacts exist today. Each subcommand runs on its own and is useful on its own: parse triages a message with no keys configured at all, and parse plus contacts plus report will produce a document you can send by hand before any API key exists.

State lives in a case directory rather than in memory, so a review can take a week and survive a reboot.

Getting started

abusectl init                  # asks, writes the config
abusectl parse message.eml     # prints the case directory it created

init needs to know which Received hops your own mail infrastructure adds, because everything below that boundary was written by whoever was talking to your server and can be forged. Three ways to answer, at one prompt:

  • type the CIDRs, if you know them
  • name a provider: gmail, fastmail, proton, outlook, privateemail, zoho, whose published sending ranges ship with the tool
  • point it at a message you know arrived legitimately with --from-sample good.eml and pick your own hops out of the real chain

parse refuses to run until that boundary is set. Guessing it wrong means reporting an innocent third party, so it does not guess.

For scripted or agent-driven setup, every question is also a flag and nothing prompts:

abusectl init --non-interactive --trusted-relays 192.0.2.0/24 198.51.100.0/24
abusectl init --non-interactive --provider fastmail

Re-running init shows what is already configured and asks before replacing it. Either way the old file is copied to config.toml.bak-<timestamp> first, and any section this run does not set, such as [misp], is carried across untouched.

Resolving the contacts

abusectl contacts ~/.local/share/abusectl/2026-09-08-a3f1

contacts reads the indicators parse recorded and asks the registries who to report each one to, over RDAP. This is the first command that needs network access, and no API key: RDAP is public.

It is read-only. It queries registries and sends nothing to anyone, so running it does not report you, or the message, to anybody. A query carries a bare host or IP address and never a URL, so the path and query string of a phishing link stay on your machine. Twenty URLs on one host produce one query.

A re-run is safe. It overwrites the contacts in the manifest rather than merging into them, so a run interrupted halfway leaves nothing half-merged, and running it again after a registry recovers simply replaces the result. The indicators themselves are untouched.

A missing abuse contact is a normal outcome, not an error. Many TLDs publish no RDAP service at all, and a registry that answers may publish a handle with no abuse role on it. Those are recorded with the reason, and the run continues: one indicator failing must not cost the contacts that did resolve. An indicator that is not a bare host or IP is kept as unusable, with why, rather than silently dropped, so you can see during review whether the parser mangled a real host or the sender planted something.

What a case looks like

~/.local/share/abusectl/2026-09-08-a3f1/
  source.eml          the original, unredacted
  manifest.json       IOCs, and later contacts and per-destination status
  bodies/             report bodies, once `report` exists

manifest.json after parse:

{
  "id": "ioc-1", "type": "ipv4", "value": "203.0.113.99",
  "origin": "received-chain", "confidence": "boundary-hop"
}

Every indicator says where it came from. An IP from the trust boundary is boundary-hop, the one address that can be stood behind; anything below it is untrusted-hop, recorded because it may be useful but never presented as fact.

Three properties that are not negotiable

Recipient identifiers are never captured. Not the To, Cc, Delivered-To or X-Original-To headers, not your Message-IDs, not maildir paths or account names. They are dropped at extraction rather than stripped at submission, so the tool cannot disclose an identifier it was never given. Tracking tokens inside URLs count: parameter values are redacted, parameter names and paths are kept, because the names fingerprint the kit and the values identify you.

Nothing remote is ever fetched while parsing. Not the URLs, not the redirect chains, not remote images. Following a link confirms your address is live to the sender and fires exactly the tracker the message wanted. Redirect chains are read from headers and link text, never by following them.

A registry query carries a bare host or IP, never a URL. contacts is the first command that talks to anyone, and an RDAP query tells a third party what you are looking at. A URL path can carry your identity, and the registrar you ask may be the attacker's own, so the path, query and fragment of a phishing link never leave your machine. Only the host does.

Reversible and irreversible

submit writes to MISP first and stops if that fails. MISP is your own instance and is correctable; a report to AbuseIPDB, URLhaus or VirusTotal cannot be recalled. The reversible step gates the irreversible ones, and it is also what answers "have I reported this infrastructure before".

Every destination carries its own status, so a retry sends only what failed. A rate-limited vendor does not mean re-reporting to the three that accepted.

Design

docs/specs/2026-09-08-abusectl-design.md is the umbrella design. Each part gets its own spec before it is built.

Requirements

Python 3.12 or newer, and nothing else for what is built today: init, parse and contacts are standard library only, contacts included, which reaches the registries with urllib. submit will need PyMISP, so a venv in the checkout is the development arrangement; packaging comes once the tool does something worth installing.

Tests

python3 -m unittest discover tests

192 tests, no framework, no network. Two of them are not ordinary unit tests and are the ones worth knowing about. The Received-chain test is mutation-checked: walking one hop too far makes it report an innocent party named in a header the attacker wrote, and the test fails if that regresses. And the suite passes with socket disabled entirely, contacts and its RDAP code included, so "nothing is fetched" is verified rather than documented. The network goes in through a fetch argument the tests replace.

License

GPLv2. See LICENSE.

Development Approach

This project is developed using AI-assisted tools. Code is generated with the help of AI based on human-provided specifications, design decisions, and iterative feedback.

All contributions are reviewed, tested, and curated by the maintainer before being included in the codebase. AI is used as a productivity and exploration tool, while human oversight remains central to all decisions.

The goal is to combine the flexibility of AI-assisted development with standard open-source practices such as transparency, review, and accountability.