Exim/FTP Brute Force Blacklist
The Exim/FTP Bruteforce Blacklist is a HostGator-maintained list of potentially malicious connection attempts to email and FTP accounts. We track all failed emails and FTP connection attempts on shared hosting environments.
When an IP address has exceeded 65 failed attempts to log in over 1 hour across any of our servers, the IP address is blocked for a minimum of 24 hours.
When an IP is blocked, exim will return the following message:
123.456.7.89 is in an RBL on bl.websitewelcome.com,
see Blocked - Too many failed logins
FTP will return the following message for a blocked IP:
Blocked ip: 123.456.7.89
What to do if your IP address is blacklisted in 3rd-party or remote blacklisting sites
Most of the time, these third-party sites provide why a customer's IP address or domain is blacklisted and give solutions to delist their IP Address or Domain. Let us use spamhaus.org as an example.
- Go to https://www.spamhaus.org.
- Click on the Blocklist Removal Center on the top-left.
- Enter your IP address or domain name, then click on Lookup.
- The next page will show if your IP address or domain name is blacklisted. The sample image below shows that the customer's IP address is listed in the XBL blocklist.
- Once you click on the Show Details dropdown, this section will show you what you need to do to remove the blacklisting. The most common recommendation is to contact your ISP or hosting provider.
