[key points]

Key points

• •A surge of unexplained bot traffic originating from China and Singapore, particularly the city of Lanzhou, has been affecting websites across various sectors, including paranormal content sites, lifestyle magazines, government domains, and e-commerce platforms.
• •Website owners initially mistook the traffic spike for genuine user engagement but quickly identified it as bot activity due to characteristics like zero-second page visits, lack of scrolling or clicks, and skewed analytics patterns.
• •Investigations suggest the bot traffic is routed through major Chinese cloud providers like Tencent, Alibaba, and Huawei, though the exact source and purpose remain unclear, with data harvesting for AI model training being a potential motive.