AbuseIPDB — IP Reputation and Threat Intelligence

AbuseIPDB is a community-curated database of IPs reported for malicious activity (brute force, DDoS, web spam, credential stuffing, etc.). ~150M+ historical reports across millions of IPs. Each IP gets a confidence score (0-100) based on report volume, recency, and reporter trust. Used by sysadmins, security teams, and AI agents doing threat intelligence.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1476+ live data sources.

Why this matters for AI agents

For security analysis — investigating a suspicious IP in logs, scoring inbound traffic, building blocklists — AbuseIPDB is the canonical free reputation source. Pair with NVD for vulnerability research and Shodan / PhishTank / URLhaus for adjacent threat intel.

Common flows:

IP check. "What's the reputation of 1.2.3.4?" → confidence score, recent reports, abuse categories.
Blacklist pull. "Get a list of IPs flagged as DDoS sources in the last 90 days" → filtered blacklist export.
Report submission. If you have evidence of abuse from an IP, you can submit a report (counts toward the reporter's trust score).

Auth

AbuseIPDB requires a free API key from https://www.abuseipdb.com/account/api. Free tier: 1,000 requests/day. Pass via _apiKey.

Confidence score interpretation

Score	Meaning
0	Never reported (or fully whitelisted)
1-25	Few reports, low confidence
26-75	Moderate concern; multiple reports across time
76-100	High confidence; active or recent malicious activity

For automated blocking, 75+ is the conservative threshold. For alerting/triage, 25+ catches more activity.

Abuse categories

Each report tags categories (multiple per report):

Category ID	Activity
3	Fraud Orders
4	DDoS Attack
5	FTP Brute-Force
9	Open Proxy
10	Web Spam
11	Email Spam
14	Port Scan
15	Hacking
18	Brute-Force
19	Bad Web Bot
21	Web App Attack
22	SSH Brute-Force

For agent-driven triage, category-aware filtering catches false positives (an IP flagged only as "Web Spam" is different from one flagged as "Hacking").

Common pitfalls

Score is reporter-weighted. A handful of trusted reporters carries more weight than many anonymous ones. Don't assume "reported by 100 sources" means 100 separate organizations — could be one researcher's 100 honeypots.
NAT and shared IPs. Carrier-grade NAT, AWS / GCP exit IPs, and Tor exit nodes get flagged constantly. A high score for a known shared IP doesn't necessarily implicate any single user.
Historical decay. Recent reports weight more than older ones. An IP that was malicious in 2019 but clean since may have a residual score that's no longer accurate.
Self-reporting bias. People report what they detect; sophisticated attacks (low-and-slow, residential proxies) underreport.
False positives from scanning. Legitimate vulnerability scanners (Shodan, Censys) get reported as abuse by uninformed sysadmins. Their IPs are well-known; whitelist them client-side.
Rate limiting on free tier. 1,000/day may not be enough for production — consider commercial tier or aggregate at the agent level via memory.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "abuseipdb": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/abuseipdb/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/abuseipdb/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1476+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

Code

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Abuseipdb data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

License

MIT

Abuseipdb README