A Wave of Unexplained Bot Traffic Is Sweeping the Web

For a brief moment 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 said, and it was never intended for an Asian audience.

However, 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 had 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 said 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.

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