Substantial Risk
IP address 165.227.188.42, registered to DIGITALOCEAN-ASN (AS14061) in the United States, is a high-risk address with a threat level of 8 out of 10, supported by a confidence score of 86 percent based on 2005 total abuse reports. The dominant threat activity involves general hacking attempts alongside port scanning reconnaissance, indicating a dual-purpose threat profile that combines both information gathering and active intrusion attempts.
The IP was first reported in September 2025 with sustained activity continuing through July 2026, representing approximately 10 months of continuous malicious behavior. All 2005 reports were generated through 20 automated honeypot sensors, reflecting systematic and automated detection across distributed monitoring infrastructure. The observed attack patterns include generic connection attempts, Suricata protocol detection alerts indicating asymmetric traffic, and Ciscoasa firewall signatures flagging port scanning behavior. The use of DigitalOcean's cloud infrastructure for threat activity is not uncommon, as cloud IP ranges are frequently exploited by threat actors seeking reliable connectivity and reputation masking.
Port scanning activity serves as preliminary reconnaissance, systematically probing target systems to identify open services and potential entry vectors before launching more targeted attacks. Simultaneously, the reported hacking-category activity encompasses general intrusion attempts and vulnerability exploitation probes that capitalize on the information gathered during scanning phases. Together, these techniques form a compound threat where reconnaissance informs and enables subsequent unauthorized access attempts, significantly elevating the risk posed to any exposed services on networks where this IP has been observed communicating.
Site operators should implement immediate blocking or aggressive rate-limiting for this IP at the network edge using standard firewall rules or defensive tools such as fail2ban. Exposed services should be minimized, with unnecessary ports and protocols restricted to reduce attack surface. All systems should be kept current with security patches, and intrusion detection systems should be configured to generate alerts for any subsequent contact attempts from this address. Ongoing monitoring of logs for related scanning patterns and connection attempts will help identify whether this IP's activity extends beyond the honeypot sensors to production infrastructure.
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