Mr. Nice Try Notes from the edge

Who rents to the scanners

88% of scanning came from rented servers.

Biggest landlord: Google LLC, with 424,500 probes from 727 of its machines. 390 networks sent scanners in all.

Thursday, Oct 15, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest

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

88%

from hosting

390

networks

▼ -4.4% vs the day before

99

countries

▼ -11% vs the day before

Top landlords probes
Google LLC 424,500
Microsoft Corporation 64,886
TECHOFF SRV LIMITED 19,269
3xK Tech GmbH 15,978
TechTies Inc. 14,327
↳ Scanners rent. They don't buy.

Every edition: from hosting

Oct 7 Oct 15

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 Yes 424,500 727
Microsoft Corporation AS8075 Yes 64,886 33
TECHOFF SRV LIMITED AS48090 — 19,269 12
3xK Tech GmbH AS200373 — 15,978 2,685
TechTies Inc. AS197170 — 14,327 17
DigitalOcean, LLC AS14061 Yes 9,442 779
TC DATACENTER LIMITED AS218785 — 4,542 8
Cloudflare, Inc. AS13335 Yes 2,758 789
M247 Europe SRL AS9009 Yes 2,457 19
Datacamp Limited AS60068, AS212238 Yes 2,058 24
Hydra Communications Ltd AS25369 — 1,953 11
InMotion Hosting, Inc. AS22611 — 1,605 1
BestDC Limited AS216014 — 1,339 1
Amazon.com, Inc. AS16509, AS14618 Yes 857 7
SolidCore Hosting LTD AS199457 — 766 18

Where the servers are

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

Country Probes Share
US 112,685 20%
AU 39,840 7%
DE 35,234 6%
KR 34,959 6%
IN 31,613 6%
IT 29,825 5%
BE 26,501 5%
FR 24,268 4%
GB 24,147 4%
QA 20,847 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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