Cautionary Risk
IP 196.251.72.5 is a medium-risk address associated with SMTP spam distribution originating from Seychelles, with a threat level of 5/10 and a moderate confidence score of 55 percent based on 1619 total abuse reports. The IP has been linked primarily to email spam activity detected through automated honeypot sensors, with the last reported activity occurring in November 2025 and no recorded ongoing frequency at present.
The abuse reports for this address number 1619 total submissions, with 20 of those specifically categorized under email spam in recent reporting periods. All detection originates from automated honeypot sensors, with no community-sourced reports in the dataset. The IP is registered to network operator CHEAPY-HOST under ASN AS401120, and geolocates to Seychelles (country code SC). The temporal clustering in November 2025 suggests concentrated SMTP abuse during that window, though the current activity frequency reads zero out of ten, indicating the address may be dormant or the hosting provider has taken action.
Email spam at this scale typically indicates the compromised or abuse-friendly hosting of mass mailing infrastructure, often leveraged for advertising campaigns, phishing distribution or malware payload delivery. Even a single spam-capable host on a network poses reputational risk to mail delivery for other tenants on the same ASN and can trigger IP blocklisting by major email providers, disrupting legitimate outbound correspondence. The moderate confidence score of 55 percent reflects some uncertainty in attribution, but the volume of reports and consistency of the SMTP spam pattern provide sufficient basis for defensive action.
Site operators should block or rate-limit incoming SMTP connections from this address at the network edge firewall, implement SPF, DKIM and DMARC records to harden recipient mail domains against spoofing, and monitor logs for any SMTP handshake attempts matching this source. Deploying fail2ban or equivalent authentication hardening tools on exposed mail relays can automatically ban repeat offenders. Reputation-based filtering services can also be consulted to augment blocking decisions with broader threat-intelligence context.