A mysterious wave of bot traffic is coursing through the World Wide Web.
In recent weeks, websites large and small have seen dramatic spikes in visitors with IP addresses in Lanzhou, China — a manufacturing-heavy city that’s not known as a tech hub — with some of the visits routed through Singapore.
The two cities accounted for one-fifth of the traffic to US government websites in the last three months. Experts are puzzled about why the bots seem to be coming from Lanzhou, though WIRED reported that many are worried companies could be harvesting web data, including copyrighted material, to train AI models.
“This is the cost of being on the internet to some degree,” one tech security analyst said.
