Critical Alert
IP 178.140.2.122 is a critical-risk address originating from the Rostelecom network in Russia that has been repeatedly linked to SSH brute-force attacks, accumulating 243 total abuse reports from automated honeypot sensors over approximately five months between October 2025 and March 2026.
The address operates on AS42610 (Rostelecom), one of Russia's largest telecommunications providers, and carries a threat level of 10/10 with a 68% confidence score, indicating that while attribution is moderately certain, the hostile activity pattern is well-established. All 243 reports were generated by automated honeypot sensors, and the consistently reported threat category centres on SSH intrusion attempts. Observed attack patterns linked to this address document multiple violations against SSH daemon services, suggesting an organized, automated scanning and credential-guessing operation rather than isolated probing.
SSH brute-force attacks systematically attempt to guess server credentials by cycling through common username and password combinations, exploiting weak or default credentials to gain unauthorized shell access to servers with exposed SSH services. For any organization running publicly accessible SSH services, successful authentication grants an attacker immediate command-line access to potentially critical infrastructure, enabling data exfiltration, lateral movement across internal networks, or deployment of secondary malware payloads. The sustained volume and duration of reports against this address indicate persistent automated scanning consistent with botnet-driven credential-stuffing campaigns.
Site operators should immediately review SSH service exposure and consider deploying key-based authentication exclusively, changing the default port from 22, and implementing automated tools such as fail2ban to automatically ban IPs after repeated authentication failures. Network-level rate limiting, disabling root login, and enforcing strong password policies across exposed systems provide additional protective depth. Regular review of authentication logs for unusual patterns from this address and similar sources will help identify potential intrusion attempts before they succeed.
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