Mr. Nice Try Notes from the edge

Who rents to the scanners

67% of scanning came from rented servers.

Biggest landlord: Google LLC, with 516,548 probes from 856 of its machines. 377 networks sent scanners in all.

Tuesday, Oct 13, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest

Cloud Landlords: 67% of scanning came from rented servers.

67%

from hosting

377

networks

▼ -0.3% vs the day before

99

countries

▲ +4.2% vs the day before

Top landlords probes
Google LLC 516,548
Google Ireland Limited 146,880
Microsoft Corporation 91,166
TECHOFF SRV LIMITED 68,766
TechTies Inc. 32,670
↳ Scanners rent. They don't buy.

Every edition: from hosting

Oct 7 Oct 13

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, AS19527 Yes 516,548 856
Google Ireland Limited AS43515 — 146,880 155
Microsoft Corporation AS8075 Yes 91,166 30
TECHOFF SRV LIMITED AS48090 — 68,766 12
TechTies Inc. AS197170 — 32,670 14
Datacamp Limited AS60068, AS212238 Yes 13,080 22
3xK Tech GmbH AS200373 — 10,562 3,876
1337 Services GmbH AS210558 — 10,487 8
TC DATACENTER LIMITED AS218785 — 7,455 11
DigitalOcean, LLC AS14061 Yes 6,704 509
BestDC Limited AS216014 — 5,207 1
Cloudflare, Inc. AS13335 Yes 3,220 1,256
Google Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd. AS139070 — 2,766 8
M247 Europe SRL AS9009 Yes 1,392 18
Storm Industries LLC AS219502 — 1,369 10

Where the servers are

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

Country Probes Share
BE 231,023 25%
US 137,457 15%
AD 73,973 8%
IN 60,471 7%
AU 51,834 6%
DE 46,551 5%
NL 45,961 5%
JP 37,533 4%
KR 32,015 4%
HK 26,810 3%

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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