72,548 in the US, 20,655 in Germany: Reading Geographic Distribution Without Over-Reading It

In the United States, there were 72,548 instances of a specific application, while Germany saw 20,655. The figures for these two countries combined account for 45 percent of all instances worldwide. Geolocation in internet datasets is typically determined by the IP address using a commercial or open database, which indicates the location where the address is registered, not necessarily where the operator is situated.

This can lead to discrepancies between the registered country and the actual location of the organization using cloud infrastructure. A multinational deploying in a single cloud region may show a high concentration in one country, even though it serves users globally. Therefore, the distribution should be interpreted as infrastructure placement rather than an assessment of national security posture.

The United States leads in this case due to a significant share of global hosting capacity being registered there. When comparing products, it's more informative to compare their distribution against a baseline product measured in the same session. In this instance, the Citrix NetScaler application had a 30 percent concentration in the United States, compared to 63 percent for the WordPress application.

This comparison highlights the difference in how these products are hosted, with the CMS often residing on shared infrastructure concentrated in a few providers, while the ADC is deployed in organizational data centers distributed by the organizations themselves. A query in the same session failed to return a number, raising a ValueError: internal error.

This should be recorded as an error, not as a zero or absence of results. The distinction is crucial, as an exposure workflow that treats a failed query as a zero would claim no matching assets, potentially leading to a closure of a finding. Conversely, a workflow that records the error preserves the gap in coverage, which can be retried later.

To conduct a geographic analysis, first measure the global total to provide a denominator for the country figures. Then, measure a baseline product in the same session to differentiate product-specific patterns from general hosting geography. Report the country counts as percentages of the global total, not as absolute rankings.

Explicitly state the limitation of the geolocation source, which is address registration, not operator location. Record errors as errors, including the query string and the message, to allow for potential retries. This step is essential to ensure the integrity of the analysis.