Mr. Nice Try Notes from the edge

Who rents to the scanners

88% of scanning came from rented servers.

Biggest landlord: Google LLC, with 288,667 probes from 604 of its machines. 738 networks sent scanners in all.

Tuesday, Oct 27, 2026 (UTC)

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Cloud Landlords: 88% of scanning came from rented servers.

88%

from hosting

738

networks

▼ -0.5% vs the day before

110

countries

▼ -13% vs the day before

Top landlords probes
Google LLC 288,667
Cloudflare, Inc. 12,112
Microsoft Corporation 12,039
F.N.S. HOLDINGS LIMITED 8,818
Cox Communications Inc. 7,421
↳ Scanners rent. They don't buy.

Every edition: from hosting

Oct 7 Oct 27

How I measure

Probe requests grouped by the network (autonomous system) their IP address belongs to, from DB-IP's free ASN database. "Hosting networks" are clouds and data centres on my list of hosting providers. Country is where the IP geolocates, which for clouds is the data centre, not the person. IP geolocation by DB-IP (CC BY 4.0).

Every landlord in the top 15

Network ASN Hosting? Probes Machines
Google LLC AS396982, AS15169 Yes 288,667 604
Cloudflare, Inc. AS13335 Yes 12,112 679
Microsoft Corporation AS8075 Yes 12,039 358
F.N.S. HOLDINGS LIMITED AS206092 — 8,818 64
Cox Communications Inc. AS22773 — 7,421 63
TECHOFF SRV LIMITED AS48090 — 4,037 19
DigitalOcean, LLC AS14061 Yes 4,001 474
Amazon.com, Inc. AS16509, AS14618 Yes 2,953 171
M247 Europe SRL AS9009 Yes 2,810 73
TechTies Inc. AS197170 — 2,736 12
TC DATACENTER LIMITED AS218785 — 2,516 12
Hydra Communications Ltd AS25369 — 2,232 10
WS Telecom Inc AS209372 — 1,851 52
Omegatech LTD AS202412 — 1,322 11
Datacamp Limited AS60068 — 1,315 10

Where the servers are

The country each probe's IP geolocates to. For clouds, that's the data centre.

Country Probes Share
US 77,285 21%
DE 30,476 8%
BE 29,627 8%
CA 24,699 7%
KR 19,821 5%
AU 18,446 5%
CH 16,086 4%
FR 14,475 4%
JP 14,372 4%
NL 13,103 4%

Past editions

Oct 27 Oct 26 Oct 25 Oct 24 Oct 23 Oct 22 Oct 21 Oct 20 Oct 19 Oct 18 Oct 17 Oct 16 Oct 15 Oct 14 Oct 13 Oct 12 Oct 11 Oct 10 Oct 9 Oct 8 Oct 7

A new one every morning.

Follow @MrNiceTry on X for each day's numbers, and the odd story about what the bots get up to.

More from yesterday

Bot Weather: 48% of yesterday's traffic was scanners.

Bot Weather · Oct 27

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How much of yesterday's web traffic was scanners, as a weather report.

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Fraud Desk · Oct 27

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Login stuffing, failed logins, and who got turned away at the door.

 Most Wanted: Bots' most wanted file: /.env

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How many minutes a brand-new website gets before the first scanner shows up.

 Costume Party: 71% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

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