Mr. Nice Try Notes from the edge

Who rents to the scanners

90% of scanning came from rented servers.

Biggest landlord: Google LLC, with 774,079 probes from 649 of its machines. 1,104 networks sent scanners in all.

Tuesday, Oct 20, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest

Cloud Landlords: 90% of scanning came from rented servers.

90%

from hosting

1,104

networks

▲ +2.2% vs the day before

145

countries

▼ -2.0% vs the day before

Top landlords probes
Google LLC 774,079
TC DATACENTER LIMITED 28,442
Microsoft Corporation 19,847
Bucklog SARL 15,226
TECHOFF SRV LIMITED 13,098
↳ Scanners rent. They don't buy.

Every edition: from hosting

Oct 7 Oct 20

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 774,079 649
TC DATACENTER LIMITED AS218785 — 28,442 17
Microsoft Corporation AS8075 Yes 19,847 31
Bucklog SARL AS211590 — 15,226 2
TECHOFF SRV LIMITED AS48090 — 13,098 26
Datacamp Limited AS60068, AS212238 Yes 9,364 50
F.N.S. HOLDINGS LIMITED AS206092 — 6,504 45
M247 Europe SRL AS9009 Yes 6,333 28
Amazon.com, Inc. AS16509, AS14618 Yes 5,595 104
Verizon Business AS5650 — 3,584 15
DigitalOcean, LLC AS14061 Yes 2,656 101
Omegatech LTD AS202412 — 1,961 12
Hydra Communications Ltd AS25369 — 1,701 13
TechTies Inc. AS197170 — 1,511 15
WS Telecom Inc AS209372 — 1,491 5

Where the servers are

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

Country Probes Share
US 165,299 18%
BE 122,445 14%
ES 58,164 6%
ZA 54,035 6%
HK 51,170 6%
FR 48,033 5%
JP 47,901 5%
KR 43,856 5%
DE 37,607 4%
IT 35,945 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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