diff options
| author | Danilo M. <danix@danix.xyz> | 2026-09-08 16:28:48 +0200 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | Danilo M. <danix@danix.xyz> | 2026-09-08 16:28:48 +0200 |
| commit | 00c68e841c416c7c069869a52d64e8c15a72e1de (patch) | |
| tree | 022318ffa636de2e81455a498ea7ed60b8f0f21e /docs/BACKLOG.md | |
| parent | cc855e388dc2c1e02447578d05150c9cff63222f (diff) | |
| download | abusectl-master.tar.gz abusectl-master.zip | |
A synthetic fixture only ever holds the shapes someone thought of, and
the shapes nobody thought of are the ones that leak. Sweeping the user's
own tag:spam is the only source of those, and it earned its place: the
first message found a header the parser did not read, and the corpus
exercised a spoofed Reply-To display name no fixture had.
AGENTS.md records it under Testing, beside the fixture rule it is the
deliberate exception to: ask first, work from the scratchpad, compare
every address in the raw source against the whole ioc output, and let
only counts and stripped domains out. A finding becomes a synthetic
fixture; the real message never enters the repository.
BACKLOG.md opens with the one thing the sweep found that was not worth
fixing blind: boilerplate namespace urls (w3.org doctypes) reported as
indicators. Noise rather than a defect, and the argument for leaving it
alone is real, so it is written down with both sides rather than built.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019NHaqA1Rz5ybed7wFUeQbK
Diffstat (limited to 'docs/BACKLOG.md')
| -rw-r--r-- | docs/BACKLOG.md | 40 |
1 files changed, 40 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/docs/BACKLOG.md b/docs/BACKLOG.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..25793e1 --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/BACKLOG.md @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +# Backlog + +Open items, newest last. One numbering sequence; a closed item keeps its +number and gains a status rather than being renumbered. + +| # | Item | Size | Status | +|---|------|------|--------| +| 1 | Skip boilerplate namespace URLs | XS | open | + +## 1. Skip boilerplate namespace URLs + +**Observed.** A sweep of 82 real spam messages reported 8 URL IOCs pointing +at `www.w3.org`, from four distinct values: + +``` +http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml +http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd +http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd +https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml +``` + +**Cause.** `_scan_urls()` scans the body text for anything URL-shaped, and an +XHTML doctype or namespace declaration is URL-shaped. The spammer did not put +those there; the HTML boilerplate did. + +**Approach.** A hostname skip-list, checked after the URL is extracted. Four +hosts cover everything the corpus produced: `www.w3.org`, `schemas.microsoft.com`, +`purl.org`, `ns.adobe.com`. Keep it a list of HOSTS, not a regex over the URL: +a hostile URL can put any string in a path or query, so matching on anything +but the host lets an attacker suppress their own indicator. + +**Constraints.** Not a leak and not a correctness defect: it is noise in a +report a human reads, and the cost is filing `w3.org` as phishing +infrastructure with an abuse desk. Weigh against the argument for leaving it +alone, which is real: a parser that reports exactly what the message contained +is easier to defend than one that decides what to omit, and every entry on a +skip-list is a thing an attacker knows will not be reported. If it is built, +the skipped URLs should still be visible somewhere during review rather than +silently dropped, on the same reasoning that makes `suspect_path_segments` +flag rather than redact. |
