Mystery bot traffic from China floods websites, puzzling cybersecurity experts
This has been happening to us on and off for months. Like the article says, it doesn’t seem to be malicious. None of our security systems has flagged anything, which I’m fairly certain would have happened by now were there anything to flag. It’s just giant traffic spikes that are almost certainly Chinese and most definitely not human. No human could possibly view the number of pages these things do in as little time as they do it, nor would he be as interested in things like the manage your subscription pages in the comment threads that the bots seem to love. Whatever they are, they’re clearly indexing something.
The worst thing I can say about them is that I’ve got a pretty good feeling that they’re the reason why the site has been getting slow at times. We’re hosted on shared servers. I don’t know how many people hang out here with us, but I’m willing to bet that some or all of them are experiencing the same thing. Enough of this going on simultaneously is bound to drag things down some.
They mess with our stats too, but that isn’t really one of those things we need to care about beyond a surface level. We don’t sell our own ads, and the closest we get to a content strategy around here is I feel like typing right now followed by typing. Any regional targeting we do is a combination of where we’re from being our main frame of reference and the location of whatever we happen to find ourselves interested in at the moment.
Google Analytics showed that these users stayed on the webpage for an average of 0 seconds and did not scroll or click at all. That’s when Quintero realised his website was being visited by an army of bots.
Quintero was not the only one whose website was being flooded by Asian bots.
Wired reported that several websites, such as an Indian lifestyle magazine, a blog about a small island near Canada, a weather-forecast platform, Shopify’s ecommerce shops, and even US government websites, were being similarly flooded by bot traffic.
For example, over the past 90 days, 14.7 per cent of visitors to US government websites were from China’s Lanzhou and 6.6 percent were from Singapore, according to Wired.And no one has an explanation for what’s going on.
To be sure, no one has alleged any wrongdoing as these bots have not been linked to any cyberattacks or other nefarious activities.
But the mystery surrounding their purpose —and the people behind them— has led to unease among web managers and observers.
Odd little aside: Watching these things hit scads of dusty old webpages has made it into my dreams.
the other night I dreamt that I was looking at stats and came upon a section of the blog that I didn’t remember at all. Carin had gotten a guide dog named James between Tansy and Domino, and had been writing rather extensively about him. He even went missing at one point!
But it wasn’t just these posts I didn’t remember. I had no recollection of James being in our lives, no matter how hard I tried. It didn’t help that the timeline made no sense. He was supposedly here during the pandemic, but a lot of the stories about him involved people and places from our time in Guelph, where we haven’t lived for over 13 years.
I was worried, of course. Why can’t I remember this? What’s going to happen if Carin starts telling a James story? I certainly can’t admit I don’t remember him or she’ll have me on the express train to the memory care wing. But I can’t fake my way through it, either. She’s not that dumb. Who should I ask instead? The person who helped find him that time is sadly no longer here, and anyone else is just going to end up telling Carin and then I’m right back where I started.
Thankfully I eventually came to enough to realize that this wasn’t real, but just in case, I did sack up and ask Carin later on when we were both awake. We had a good laugh, which was a relief. But I am still a bit worried whenever I hear a train whistle…
I have to laugh that my dreams have combined with your dreams. I always dream about losing my dogs. I still have dreams that I should write down, like the one where I let Domino walk next to me without a leash through a busy circus and of course we lost track of him and then we had to continue home and hope someone found him. Then we got home and we had another dog. She greeted us and we were like “Did Domino make it home?” No, apparently this was some other dog we owned named Floofiet. Floofiet? What the heck? Anyway, stupid bots are scrambling our brains. I wondered why the site dragged so hard some days.
Floofiet is more creative than James, I’ll say that. And considering some of the weird names they sometimes stick on those dogs, it’s probably more likely too.