Published on 29th July 2025, 13:30:00 UTC
The saying "there is nothing so constant as change" rings true, yet embracing change can be challenging. We humans are creatures of habit, and shifts in established, trusted systems can understandably lead to unease. We recognize that abuse.ch is currently undergoing significant changes, and while we've been communicating some of these since 2022, the strengthened alliance between abuse.ch and Spamhaus is now becoming more apparent.
As we at abuse.ch put the community into the center of what we do, it is important for us to bring them along on this journey. Here, we'll outline our drivers, the anticipated benefits, and the roadmap for our evolving partnership with Spamhaus.
There was a talented and passionate Swiss nerd named Roman. His focus, for almost 95% of the waking day, was on ridding the Internet of bad actors. (As an aside, the other 5% was focused on burgers purchased from the Golden Arches and chocolate - well, the man is a Swiss national, after all).
Roman forged a community that became famous for its mission and reach. Growing this not-for-profit organization into an entity that enables over 15,000 users to share vast amounts of malware-related data across various platforms, which receive millions of API queries a day.
During the next fifteen years, Roman searched for funding to secure the future of his creation. Meanwhile, infrastructure costs grew exponentially, while other companies used the open-source data for their commercial products, profiting from Roman's and the contributors' efforts. All the while, Roman's precious time was being diverted from threat hunting and development to finding sponsors (which turned out to be very painful) and managing a burgeoning community.
To quit, or not to quit? That became the question. Should Roman turn his back on half a lifetime of work and walk away from a thriving group of individuals that shared the common goal of making the Internet a safer place, or should he create an alliance with a like-minded organization? One that could provide stability and enable the community to increase their impact, making abuse.ch sustainable for another 15 years (at least!).
It's unlikely to come as a surprise that Roman chose the latter option. Partnering with Spamhaus Technology an organization, known to and trusted by Roman for over a decade and intrinsically aligned with abuse.ch's values and beliefs...
Sustainability - today, abuse.ch requires the efforts of more than one man (particularly one man who also has a day job). Working with a larger organization provides access to much-needed resources and expertise, from development teams to marketing, not forgetting crucial financial support. To date, Spamhaus has invested thousands of man-hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars into abuse.ch’s future.
Stability - the platforms were built for a small number of users, not the thousands who download and query its datasets. The code and infrastructure are not robust enough to cope with the ever-growing demands of users and contributors. Outages, sadly, are a regular occurrence for users, none more so than when commercial organizations heavily utilize the APIs. Spamhaus is working through the technical debt to try to create stability for abuse.ch's users.
Growth - there is a desire to continually enhance the functionality of the platforms for the community. This year has seen the release of a new false positive dataset, autodeletions of file submissions on YARAify, and more recently, the release of hunting.abuse.ch, enabling users to query all the platform's datasets from one place. New developments keep moving the platforms forward, but are resource-intensive.
Increased impact - Spamhaus has nearly three decades of experience in working with the industry, maintaining impactful relationships with registries, networks and the wider Internet community, where it effects change. This increases the breadth of impact on the data that the abuse.ch community contributes.
Yes. It does. We could get highly philosophical here, but let's keep this focused on business and look to the simple laws of economics: production has costs, and these costs must be met; otherwise, an organization, whether commercial or non-profit, will fold.
abuse.ch cannot continue to evolve and support its community, as well as those who depend on the data and insights provided, with volunteer funding and equipment, as we've already explained. So, to address this issue, abuse.ch, together with Spamhaus, will be developing a commercial model that will enable it to remain independent, all the while continuing to support, highlight, and strengthen the community.
Spamhaus Technology is making the abuse.ch data available to organizations that are NOT making significant contributions to the community, but are deriving commercial gain from the use of this data. And yes, a cost will be associated with accessing these feeds. Users of the paid version of the data will get additional benefits such as unified APIs, including access to technical documentation and more efficient false positive remediation.
Meanwhile, if you contribute data, you will be able to access the data for free.
Our partnership isn't focused on becoming the biggest, most profitable provider of cyber threat intelligence. Ultimately, this approach is designed to help abuse.ch expand its capabilities to combat abuse and support the mission of making the Internet a safer place by providing actionable, community-driven threat intelligence data. Remember, it is Roman and you, the community, that have made this platform possible, special, and trusted. What you do, the impact you have on cyber cybersecurity world-wide and how we celebrate it will not change.