A wave of unexplained bot traffic is sweeping the Web
- 15 hours ago
- 1 min read
For a brief moment in October, Alejandro Quintero thought he had made it big in China. The Bogotá-based data analyst owns and manages a website that publishes articles about paranormal activities, like ghosts and aliens. The content is written in “Spanglish,” he says, and was never intended for an Asian audience.
But last fall, Quintero’s site suddenly began receiving a large volume of visits from China and Singapore. The amount of traffic coming from the two countries was so high and consistent that it now accounts for more than half of total visits to Quintero’s site over the past 12 months.
When he first noticed the traffic spike, Quintero thought he’d found an audience on the other side of the world. “I need to travel to China right now because I’m the bomb there,” Quintero says he recalls thinking.
But as soon as he dug into the data, he knew something was wrong. Google Analytics, a common tool used by website owners to parse web traffic, shows that all the Chinese visitors are from one specific city: Lanzhou. They are unlikely to be real humans, because they stay on the page for an average of 0 seconds and don’t scroll or click. Quintero quickly realized his website was actually being bombarded by bots.
Read the full story | WIRED
