Mr. Nice Try Notes from the edge

Who rents to the scanners

87% of scanning came from rented servers.

Biggest landlord: Google LLC, with 268,370 probes from 621 of its machines. 742 networks sent scanners in all.

Monday, Oct 26, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest

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Cloud Landlords: 87% of scanning came from rented servers.

87%

from hosting

742

networks

▼ -6.9% vs the day before

127

countries

– 0.0% vs the day before

Top landlords probes
Google LLC 268,370
Cloudflare, Inc. 14,283
Microsoft Corporation 13,717
Oracle Corporation 8,650
Cox Communications Inc. 6,845
↳ Scanners rent. They don't buy.

Every edition: from hosting

Oct 7 Oct 26

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 Yes 268,370 621
Cloudflare, Inc. AS13335 Yes 14,283 749
Microsoft Corporation AS8075 Yes 13,717 295
Oracle Corporation AS31898 Yes 8,650 15
Cox Communications Inc. AS22773 — 6,845 77
Eweka Internet Services B.V. AS34343 — 6,192 5
TechTies Inc. AS197170 — 5,738 9
DigitalOcean, LLC AS14061 Yes 2,940 190
TECHOFF SRV LIMITED AS48090 — 2,900 22
WS Telecom Inc AS209372 — 2,817 31
Omegatech LTD AS202412 — 2,679 16
M247 Europe SRL AS9009 Yes 2,437 62
Amazon.com, Inc. AS16509, AS14618 Yes 1,897 155
Hydra Communications Ltd AS25369 — 1,818 10
Datacamp Limited AS60068 — 1,460 9

Where the servers are

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

Country Probes Share
US 92,691 26%
CA 36,766 10%
NL 27,430 8%
IT 24,596 7%
JP 23,276 6%
KR 20,902 6%
CL 15,955 4%
DE 15,261 4%
FR 10,954 3%
TW 9,441 3%

Past editions

Oct 27 Oct 26 Oct 25 Oct 24 Oct 23 Oct 22 Oct 21 Oct 20 Oct 19 Oct 18 Oct 17 Oct 16 Oct 15 Oct 14 Oct 13 Oct 12 Oct 11 Oct 10 Oct 9 Oct 8 Oct 7

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.

More from yesterday

Bot Weather: 48% of yesterday's traffic was scanners.

Bot Weather · Oct 27

48% of yesterday's traffic was scanners.

How much of yesterday's web traffic was scanners, as a weather report.

 Fraud Desk: 457,316 requests got turned away at the door.

Fraud Desk · Oct 27

457,316 requests got turned away at the door.

Login stuffing, failed logins, and who got turned away at the door.

 Most Wanted: Bots' most wanted file: /.env

Most Wanted · Oct 27

Bots' most wanted file: /.env

The files bots asked for most yesterday. It's usually your .env.

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The AI Key Heist · Oct 27

Bots went hunting for AI keys 3,362 times.

Bots are hunting for AI API keys. Here's whose they want most.

 Speedrun: New sites get scanned in under a minute.

Speedrun · Oct 27

New sites get scanned in under a minute.

How many minutes a brand-new website gets before the first scanner shows up.

 Costume Party: 71% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

Costume Party · Oct 27

71% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

Bots dressed up as Chrome, caught by their handshake. Plus the honest bots wearing name tags.