What’s the process for triaging abuse reports?

Abuse report triage is the process of taking an incoming report and quickly determining: how serious is this, what kind of problem is it, and who needs to deal with it. Speed and accuracy both matter here. Missing a real threat is bad. Crying wolf on false positives burns your response team's attention and credibility.

The first question is credibility. Does the report include enough evidence to investigate? A message forward with full headers is actionable. "I think I got a phishing email" with no attachment or details is not. Your intake process should prompt for the full message as evidence.

Next, categorize by threat type. Spam (bulk unsolicited commercial email) is low urgency. Phishing targeting credentials is high urgency. Malware or ransomware delivery is critical. Impersonation of your organization or executives is high urgency because it affects your brand and your users. CEO fraud (business email compromise) is critical because it often targets wire transfers or sensitive data access.

Scope assessment comes next. Is this one-off (only this reporter received it) or a campaign (multiple reports of the same sender or template)? A campaign requires broader response: pulling the message from other inboxes, alerting the user base, and potentially engaging law enforcement or your email security vendor. A one-off gets documented and closed unless it contains novel indicators worth tracking.

Assign by capability: phishing investigation goes to someone with header forensics skills, malware analysis goes to someone who can safely examine attachments, brand impersonation response goes to whoever owns your domain's DMARC and abuse reporting relationships.

Track every report, even the false positives. Volume trends tell you when a threat campaign is scaling, and documented false positive patterns help you tune your detection to reduce noise.