Mystery bot traffic from China floods websites, puzzling cybersecurity experts – Firstpost
 "Mystery bot traffic from China floods websites, puzzling cybersecurity experts – Firstpost")
Mystery bot traffic from China floods websites, puzzling cybersecurity experts – Firstpost
Publish Date: 2026-02-16 00:45:00
Source Domain: www.firstpost.com
Using an unordered list, summarize the following article with between 4 and 8 key points. Since September, Western websites have been flooded by visitors from China and Singapore. Initially, web managers believed they had discovered a new audience but the traffic turned out to be bots — and no one can explain why Chinese bots are visiting their sites.Since September, many Western websites have been flooded by visitors from China and Singapore. Initially, web managers thought they had found a new audience, but they soon learnt that their new visitors were not humans but bots. And they could not understand why Chinese bots were flooding their sites.In October, Columbia’s Alejandro Quintero, who runs a website about paranormal activities, noticed a spike in Chinese and Singaporean visitors that was so significant that they accounted for more than half of the total visitors to the site over the past year, according to Wired.STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS ADBut Quintero’s excitement was short-lived as he soon realised that the entire traffic came from just one place: the Chinese city of Lanzhou.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.Mystery of Asian bots persistsTo 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.One theory is that these bots could be part of an operation to scrape or harvest data from these websites to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. Normally, AI companies identify such bots but such ethical concerns do not apply to Chinese companies that operate without safeguards or disclaimers.A key part of the mystery is the fact that most of the traffic appears to originate in Lanzhou even though the city is not a technology hub and does not host many data centres.STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS ADIn reality, Lanzhou might not even be the actual source of the bots, Gavin King, founder of web traffic analysis company Known Agents, told Wired.King said the only thing he could be certain about was that all of the traffic was eventually routed through Singapore. He added that Google Analytics showed Lanzhou merely as an educated guess of the source, not a precise location.But there was still a Chinese connection.Most of the traffic was being routed through servers of Chinese companies belonging to Tencent, according to King.Corroborating this finding, Andy, who manages the web portal mentioned above, said the bot traffic to his website was also routed through servers of Chinese companies Tencent, Alibaba, and Huawei.But it is not known whether these bots are in-house entities of these tech giants or if a client is using their servers to send the bots.HomeTechMystery bot traffic from China floods websites, puzzling cybersecurity expertsEnd of Article
