One way to help "keep machines from swinging their fists" is to quickly notify their ISP when they do start attacking. http://www.mynetwatchman.com/vision.htm
explains a system of currently 1478 people who submit their Firewall logs using an automated agent to a server which aggregates the data, backtraces the activity to its source, filters false alarms, and automatically sends escalation e-mails to responsible party, often the network abuse contact for the ISP which owns the netblock of the IP address.
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One way to help "keep machines from swinging their fists" is to quickly notify their ISP when they do start attacking. http://www.mynetwatchman.com/vision.htm explains a system of currently 1478 people who submit their Firewall logs using an automated agent to a server which aggregates the data, backtraces the activity to its source, filters false alarms, and automatically sends escalation e-mails to responsible party, often the network abuse contact for the ISP which owns the netblock of the IP address.