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[tor-relays] Re: Netscan Hetzner



Unfortunately, Hetzner is raising false positives.

Not sure anybody has reached out to Hetzner in attempts to correct their systemtic issue?

Operating the largest group of Guard relays on Tor at the moment, I receive emails from Tor operators wondering why Hetzner is reporting abusive behavior.

I have not heard of any other provider sending these types of abuse emails that Hetzner is.

Picking a provider who is more friendly to Tor traffic, including not sending false positive abuse emails, and has fewer operating Tor relays to increase diversity is likely a good outcome.

Most agree that blocking legitimate Tor relay traffic is not an ideal solution.

Most detailed analysis I've seen has been here: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/analysis/-/issues/105

Let us know all know how it sorts out and how we can help.
Hope you keep running Tor relays!


On Sunday, December 28th, 2025 at 1:36 PM, Diyar Ciftci via tor-relays <tor-relays@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Good evening,

Apologies as this is likely the incorrect way to do things. I'm not fantastic with mailing lists. I saw on tor forum that some people were getting these netscan emails from hetzner.
https://forum.torproject.org/t/tor-relays-abuse-report-from-relays-in-family-7eaac49a7840d33b62fa276429f3b03c92aa9327/20693

I got my first a few months ago and I just got my second one about an hour ago. Both times it was to the 1st amendment group IP addresses. Last time I just clicked their check button and it passed and then I gave reasoning in the next link. For some reason it doesn't seem to be liking when I click the first link this time and keeps saying not solved. I don't know what my best course of action is. I've gotten 2 reports for hetzner for a guard and 0 for netcup for an exit relay :( I saw in the forum post (which is to a clone of the mailing list) about temporarily blocking tor but that feels a bit deceptive so I don't really want to go down that route. The best thing though it may be a long process as there may be a potential harm to how circuits are built negatively affecting user anonymity is for the tor program to operate in a manner so that it doesn't look like a netscan to some sensitive providers like hetzner even though we know it isn't a netscan anyways.

If this issue keeps coming up with hetzner I may look at not hosting a tor relay with them because I have a lot of stuff on this server like my personal website and project mirrors and such and don't want those to be negatively affected due to a unjust IP ban by hetzner for running a tor relay.

Any advice?

Kind regards,
Diyar Ciftci

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