Mr. Nice Try Notes from the edge

Who rents to the scanners

82% of scanning came from rented servers.

Biggest landlord: Google LLC, with 58,028 probes from 165 of its machines. 50 networks sent scanners in all.

Friday, Oct 9, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest

Cloud Landlords: 82% of scanning came from rented servers.

82%

from hosting

50

networks

▲ +47% vs the day before

30

countries

▲ +36% vs the day before

Top landlords probes
Google LLC 58,028
Microsoft Corporation 14,927
TECHOFF SRV LIMITED 8,130
Google Ireland Limited 3,780
Eweka Internet Services B.V. 812
↳ Scanners rent. They don't buy.

Every edition: from hosting

Oct 7 Oct 9

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 58,028 165
Microsoft Corporation AS8075 Yes 14,927 33
TECHOFF SRV LIMITED AS48090 — 8,130 8
Google Ireland Limited AS43515 — 3,780 4
Eweka Internet Services B.V. AS34343 — 812 5
DigitalOcean, LLC AS14061 Yes 512 24
TechTies Inc. AS197170 — 507 6
Storm Industries LLC AS219502 — 476 10
Amazon.com, Inc. AS16509 Yes 466 1
M247 Europe SRL AS9009 Yes 432 11
Powerhouse Management, Inc. AS22363 — 370 4
F.N.S. HOLDINGS LIMITED AS206092 — 320 10
Hydra Communications Ltd AS25369 — 315 7
Aeza Group LLC AS216246 — 254 1
Lambda AS398090 — 245 1

Where the servers are

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

Country Probes Share
BE 16,553 18%
US 12,688 14%
JP 10,127 11%
SE 9,199 10%
AD 8,227 9%
HK 7,768 9%
IN 7,216 8%
KR 3,457 4%
TW 3,456 4%
NL 3,448 4%

Past editions

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.

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