I was looking at the WordPress statistics just now, and I saw that an old, obscure post had suddenly gotten popular.
Looking at the details, all the hits are from different IP addresses, and all the visitors come via Google! Over a 15 minute period!
So that’s obviously not real — it’s a botnet of some kind. The botnet is using a wide variety of User-Agent strings, all mapping to real browsers and not automated systems. And these are all using a (headless) browser, because the stats are triggered from Javascript, so just loading the pages doesn’t lead to a “view”.
And sure enough, looking at the “spam” tab in the comments overview, there’s a whole bunch of spam comments in this period. But oddly enough, there’s about 500 spam comments (on this article alone) over a two day period, and the other 464 comments did not trigger the stats counter. So… one gang of spammers are using a full (headless) browser, while the other spammers are being more efficient? I dunno.
(And also, all the IP addresses are different — but presumably they’re using a proxy that VPNs to random client IP address, so that doesn’t tell us anything.)
Anyway. Just another annoyance, and I guess there’s not much I can do to filter out traffic like this. (Looking at the Jetpack Stats, they also fail to identify this as bot traffic.) I just thought this was extremely mildly interesting? But whatchagonnado.
OK, back to reading books.