"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."
"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. Quintero later found out from social media that he was far from the only website operator who started seeing a large influx of bots from China and Singapore beginning in September."
Bogotá-based data analyst Alejandro Quintero manages a Spanglish website about paranormal activities that suddenly received large volumes of visits from China and Singapore. Google Analytics shows all Chinese visitors came from Lanzhou, stayed on pages an average of 0 seconds, and did not scroll or click, indicating nonhuman behavior. Social media reports show many other sites — from small blogs to large platforms and government domains — experienced similar influxes starting in September. In the last 90 days, 14.7% of visits to US government websites came from Lanzhou and 6.6% from Singapore, significantly skewing analytics and indicating coordinated bot activity.
Read at WIRED
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