Severe Risk
IP 204.76.203.28 is a high-risk address originating from the Netherlands, operated by Pfcloud UG under ASN AS51396, with a critical 10/10 threat rating and 1440 total abuse reports from automated honeypot sensors since August 2025. The dominant threat activity involves SSH intrusion attempts, consistent with widespread automated scanning and credential-based attacks against internet-exposed servers.
The IP has been flagged across 20 separate honeypot detection sensors generating 1440 aggregate reports between August and December 2025, indicating sustained scanning infrastructure rather than isolated probe attempts. While the most recent report breakdown shows 19 hacking-category events and a single SSH-category event, the sheer volume of historical reports demonstrates persistent automated behavior. The Netherlands-based network operator Pfcloud UG operates the assigned address space, and the high confidence score of 65% reflects substantial evidence from multiple independent detection sources. The apparent disconnect between the high report count and reported activity frequency may indicate that the threat activity is distributed across extended time periods rather than concentrated in short bursts.
SSH brute-force attacks represent one of the most persistent automated threat vectors targeting internet-connected servers today. An IP accumulating 1440 reports demonstrates organized, systematic scanning infrastructure actively probing for misconfigured or poorly secured SSH daemons. The real-world risk includes complete server compromise leading to data exfiltration, lateral network movement, deployment of secondary payloads such as cryptominers, and potential recruitment into larger botnets for distributed denial-of-service operations. Each failed authentication attempt represents a potential vulnerability window when services remain exposed to exploitation attempts.
Site operators should implement immediate defensive measures: configure automated blocking tools such as fail2ban to ban source IPs after repeated failed authentication attempts, enforce key-based SSH authentication exclusively and disable password-based access entirely, consider changing the default SSH listening port to reduce automated scanning exposure, and ensure all SSH server software remains current with security patches. Regular review of authentication logs and implementation of network-level rate limiting on port 22 can further reduce exposure to similar scanning infrastructure.