This time on PING, I’m talking to Alban Kwan from the Trusted Notifier Network (TNN). I caught up with Alban at the APRICOT 2026 / APNIC 61 event held recently in Jakarta, where Alban was attending the policy and governance sessions with a particular interest in the problem of online abuse mitigation.
Alban is interested in bridging the gap between the business and technical communities in this space. When it comes to crafting a response, businesses tend to focus on brand integrity and the real-world cost of mitigation when their products and services are abused, used for spam or fraud or suffer inbound attacks against them.
The technical community often focuses on network‑level views of problems, such as deep packet inspection, honeynets, and firewall logs, which, in turn, drives security efforts toward network technologies. This reflects a genuine cultural divide.
We’ve discussed the more technical, packet-level distributed threats on previous episodes of PING. We’ve talked with Adli Wahid from APNIC and with Leslie Daigle from Global Cyber Alliance, discussing honeynets, which present as low barrier attack targets and can measure the levels of abuse coming to unprotected websites and online services and help pinpoint where they come from.
In addition, Leslie has raised a concern that we need a conversation in wider civil society about the governance issues to address this problem because technology alone can’t solve what’s clearly a societal problem.
TNN is part of that civil society response to online abuse, albeit in a slightly different form, focused on communication between the involved parties and a concept of a higher trust channel, a better signal-to-noise ratio, which reduces real-world cost and preserves business reputation.
Alban has an interesting analytical model of how to think about the problem, and I think it’s interesting to look at his engagement with business processes and how people build mutuality and trust when dealing with abuse problems of any kind.
Read more about TNN on the web:
- Trusted Notifier Network (website)
- Unfair cost transfer and the reversal of business interest (CircleID article)
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