Severe Risk
IP 45.10.175.246, hosted in the United Kingdom on AS55933 operated by Cloudie Limited, is a critical-risk address with a 10/10 threat level and a substantial body of 253 abuse reports originating from automated honeypot sensors. While the confidence score of 58 percent indicates some uncertainty in attribution, the volume of community and sensor reports warrants treating this IP as a serious threat. The address was first and most recently reported during August 2025, confirming active malicious activity within that timeframe. The dominant threat category is SSH-based intrusion activity, with 20 recent reports specifically documenting SSH brute-force attempts detected by honeypot infrastructure.
The evidence base for this assessment comes entirely from automated honeypot sensors, which logged 253 total reports over the observed period. All 20 of the most recent threat-category reports document SSH brute-force attempts, indicating a sustained and focused effort to compromise Secure Shell services. The IP's presence on a commercial cloud infrastructure provider suggests the attacker is utilizing provisioned resources rather than compromised residential endpoints, which can complicate takedown efforts. Despite the zero activity frequency score, the high absolute report volume demonstrates that this address has historically engaged in persistent scanning and authentication-attack behaviour against exposed SSH services.
SSH brute-force attacks represent a direct pathway to server compromise, allowing threat actors to gain initial access, escalate privileges, and deploy further payloads including backdoors, cryptocurrency miners, or ransomware. Even servers with moderately strong passwords remain at risk given the scale and speed of modern brute-force tooling. The real-world danger lies in the volume of these attacks — exposed SSH ports are constantly scanned across the internet, and any service left reachable without hardening becomes a target. Compromised SSH servers frequently become pivot points for lateral movement within networks or are recruited into botnets for distributed attacks.
Site operators should immediately block or rate-limit traffic from 45.10.175.246 at the firewall level and monitor logs for any successful connections from this address. For SSH services specifically, disabling password-based authentication in favour of public key infrastructure eliminates the entire brute-force attack surface. Port-knocking, fail2ban intrusion-detection automation, and restricting SSH access to known IP ranges provide additional defensive layers. Regular audit of authentication logs and enforcement of strong, unique credentials remain essential even when automated blocking is in place, as attackers periodically shift tactics to circumvent perimeter controls.