Mr. Nice Try Notes from the edge

Who rents to the scanners

83% of scanning came from rented servers.

Biggest landlord: Google LLC, with 662,745 probes from 479 of its machines. 1,080 networks sent scanners in all.

Monday, Oct 19, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest

Cloud Landlords: 83% of scanning came from rented servers.

83%

from hosting

1,080

networks

▲ +44% vs the day before

148

countries

▲ +10% vs the day before

Top landlords probes
Google LLC 662,745
TC DATACENTER LIMITED 65,681
TECHOFF SRV LIMITED 45,741
Microsoft Corporation 17,673
Bucklog SARL 7,448
↳ Scanners rent. They don't buy.

Every edition: from hosting

Oct 7 Oct 19

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 662,745 479
TC DATACENTER LIMITED AS218785 — 65,681 17
TECHOFF SRV LIMITED AS48090 — 45,741 26
Microsoft Corporation AS8075 Yes 17,673 38
Bucklog SARL AS211590 — 7,448 3
M247 Europe SRL AS9009 Yes 6,832 25
DigitalOcean, LLC AS14061 Yes 4,128 510
Hydra Communications Ltd AS25369 — 3,504 11
1337 Services GmbH AS210558 — 2,935 7
TechTies Inc. AS197170 — 2,868 20
Omegatech LTD AS202412 — 2,286 13
Datacamp Limited AS60068, AS212238 Yes 2,164 28
Verizon Business AS5650 — 2,060 11
WS Telecom Inc AS209372 — 1,550 6
Cloudflare, Inc. AS13335 Yes 1,462 743

Where the servers are

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

Country Probes Share
BE 341,775 41%
US 78,616 9%
HK 71,793 9%
AD 45,741 5%
KR 29,663 4%
FR 27,964 3%
NL 24,292 3%
IT 23,857 3%
ES 21,403 3%
DE 21,283 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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