Mr. Nice Try Notes from the edge

Who rents to the scanners

93% of scanning came from rented servers.

Biggest landlord: Google LLC, with 548,656 probes from 336 of its machines. 297 networks sent scanners in all.

Saturday, Oct 17, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest

Cloud Landlords: 93% of scanning came from rented servers.

93%

from hosting

297

networks

▼ -9.5% vs the day before

91

countries

▼ -9.0% vs the day before

Top landlords probes
Google LLC 548,656
Microsoft Corporation 62,512
TECHOFF SRV LIMITED 24,795
DigitalOcean, LLC 15,597
TechTies Inc. 3,700
↳ Scanners rent. They don't buy.

Every edition: from hosting

Oct 7 Oct 17

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 548,656 336
Microsoft Corporation AS8075 Yes 62,512 38
TECHOFF SRV LIMITED AS48090 — 24,795 10
DigitalOcean, LLC AS14061 Yes 15,597 309
TechTies Inc. AS197170 — 3,700 19
Oracle Corporation AS31898 Yes 3,600 1
M247 Europe SRL AS9009 Yes 3,052 20
BestDC Limited AS216014 — 3,026 1
Omegatech LTD AS202412 — 2,611 14
1337 Services GmbH AS210558 — 2,198 5
TC DATACENTER LIMITED AS218785 — 1,780 12
Datacamp Limited AS60068, AS212238 Yes 1,390 18
Cloudflare, Inc. AS13335 Yes 1,310 628
Hydra Communications Ltd AS25369 — 1,309 11
3xK Tech GmbH AS200373 — 935 769

Where the servers are

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

Country Probes Share
BE 362,454 53%
US 56,417 8%
NL 45,846 7%
DE 34,004 5%
AU 28,354 4%
AD 27,821 4%
KR 21,078 3%
SG 19,675 3%
IN 19,163 3%
BR 11,855 2%

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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