The Solution

M3AAF advocates safe and effective Internet access for users in all countries with all the benefits of participating in the online community, including economic growth and improved well being. We encourage reliable, safe and sustainable access to the global Internet community for business, governments and users.

In a similar manner, the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG), an international non-profit and industry-led organization, has taken a multi-disciplinary approach to fighting online abuse for the past decade, with industry education, public policy advice, the development of industry best practices and by facilitating global collaboration. M3AAWG draws technical experts, researchers and policy specialists from a broad base of Internet service providers and network operators representing over one billion mailboxes, and from key technology providers, academia and volume sender organizations.

However, beyond its rich resources of expertise and proven best practices, the organization does not have sufficient funds nor a mandate from its members for educational outreach beyond M3AAWG specific meetings and activities. As a result, funds are not available to support emerging online countries with the necessary worldwide travel of experts and the development of additional materials to sustain an outreach program and other requests for training.

The solution: A New Foundation dedicated to the necessary outreach work and to sustain the long-term effort that will be required to support developing countries training needs. This new independent entity is championed by M3AAWG and supported with continued development of proven anti-abuse best practices.

The Foundation’s Goals

  1. Help emerging online countries become functional and safely-engaged participants in the global community by training industry ecosystem producers – such as ISPs and network operators, email service providers, technically-focused government agencies and NGOs — to avoid spreading unwanted traffic and other threats to the Internet community. This includes training to reduce the distribution of abusive messaging on all platforms and to abate related threats like bandwidth hijacking.
  2. Provide training to help emerging online countries protect their own citizens from Internet abuses, such as spam, phishing, malware, bots and other threats.

How the Foundation Will Achieve These Goals

  1. Provide experts to speak on best practices and topical work that already exists within M3AAWG and other respected anti-abuse organizations.
  2. Develop programs and curriculum for basic “101 courses” since M3AAWG and others’ best practices assume certain technical and operational knowledge, that take network administrators and anti-abuse personnel to the next level by teaching how to operate and manage safe networks.
  3. Train the trainers on anti-abuse best practices so that the instruction lives on and is not “one shot work.”
  4. Provide training at hosted training venues such as ISOC Combating Spam Project workshops or M3AAF organized workshop/training meetings.
  5. Develop partnerships with other organizations in related work to expand the M3AAF outreach effort.
  6. Develop relationships with “champions on the ground’ in each region as a channel for sharing future M3AAWG and other organizations’ best practices.

We hope you will join us in ensuring developing countries become safe, functional and valued members of the Internet community. For more information, please contact Jerry Upton at jerry.upton@m3aaf.org.