Substantial Risk
Verdict: IP 45.135.232.177 is a high-risk Russian address that has accumulated 876 total abuse reports and represents a confirmed SSH brute-force threat, with 20 recent automated honeypot detections logged against SSH services over a four-month surveillance window ending November 2025.
Evidence and Context: This IP, routed through ASN AS198953 and operated by Proton66 OOO within Russian network infrastructure, was first flagged in August 2025 and continued generating reports through November 2025. All 20 recent threat reports originate exclusively from automated honeypot sensors, yielding a 67 percent confidence score that the activity is malicious rather than incidental. Despite an activity frequency rating of zero in the most recent measurement period, the substantial cumulative report count of 876 confirms sustained, repeated engagement with targeted services over time rather than isolated probes. The honeypot captures consistently logged SSH-based patterns, with fail2ban registering the activity on sshd, indicating that this address has been automatically blocked at least once by standard defensive tooling after triggering authentication-failure thresholds.
Threat Explanation: SSH brute-force activity involves systematic attempts to guess server credentials by cycling through common username-password combinations or known weak authentication pairs. Successful compromise grants attackers remote command execution, potential data exfiltration, or use of the compromised host as a pivot point for lateral movement within networks. Even failed attempts consume server resources, generate log noise that can mask more sophisticated intrusion attempts, and signal that the target infrastructure is exposed and responding to authentication probes. The detection of this IP by multiple honeypot sensors confirms it is part of automated scanning infrastructure that systematically catalogues and attacks publicly accessible SSH endpoints at scale.
Recommendations: Site operators running accessible SSH services should immediately enforce key-based authentication and disable password-based login entirely. Changing the default SSH listening port reduces exposure to opportunistic scanning. Configuring aggressive account lockout policies using tools such as fail2ban will automatically block repeated authentication failures. Ongoing monitoring of authentication logs for the reappearance of this address, combined with network-level blocking at the firewall or edge device, provides layered defense against renewed probing activity.
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