Elevated Risk
IP address 204.76.203.233, registered in the Netherlands and operated by Pfcloud UG under autonomous system AS51396, presents a high-risk threat profile with a threat-level score of 8 out of 10 and a confidence rating of 79 percent. The address has generated 686 abuse reports sourced from 20 distinct automated honeypot sensors, with activity detected continuously between August 2025 and May 2026, indicating persistent and sustained malicious behaviour over a nine-month window.
Analysis of the 686 total reports shows that the dominant threat category is general hacking activity, accounting for 19 of the most recent logged incidents, followed by SSH-specific attacks contributing 3 recent reports and a single IoT-targeted report. The honeypot sensor data reveals a pattern of Suricata alerts indicating SSH sessions in progress on expected ports, with correlated evidence of brute-force credential-guessing attempts. Additional stream-level anomalies, including spurious TCP retransmissions, further corroborate active intrusion tooling against exposed services. With an activity frequency rating of 7 out of 10, this IP demonstrates a high cadence of automated scanning and attack behaviour rather than isolated probing.
The primary risk posed by 204.76.203.233 stems from automated SSH brute-force attacks targeting servers with exposed port 22 or non-standard SSH listeners. These campaigns leverage credential lists and dictionary-based guessing to compromise accounts with weak or default passwords, providing adversaries with a foothold for data exfiltration, lateral movement or cryptojacking deployment. The secondary hacking activity signals broader port scanning and vulnerability-probing infrastructure, consistent with adversaries assembling reconnaissance data for more targeted intrusions. The single IoT-related report suggests this host may also participate in scans or exploit attempts targeting poorly secured connected devices.
Site operators exposing SSH services should immediately enforce key-based authentication, replace password-based login entirely and disable direct root access. Implementing automated blocking tools such as fail2ban or comparable rate-limiting solutions to ban source IPs after repeated failed authentication attempts will substantially reduce exposure. Regular patching of SSH daemons, operating systems and any exposed IoT firmware remains critical, as does restricting SSH access to known IP ranges via firewall rules or VPN gating. Network segmentation of IoT and smart devices from core infrastructure limits the blast radius of any successful compromise attributed to this address.
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