999 Browsers - bots?

[Meghan_Powers]

We're seeing a huge increase in what appears to be bot, or at least not-legitimate, traffic to our site.  A lot of them seem to be coming from browsers containing '999'.  Has anyone experienced this before?  Does anyone know what this could be?  We're finding various ways to break it down of course to try to isolate it but happy to take suggestions.

[igupta]

Hey @Meghan_Powers ,

Interesting! I am also seeing some data like this. Are you saying these are bot traffic?

[Meghan_Powers]

That seems to be our interpretation given the huge and sudden influx of traffic that doesn't do 'secondary actions' like clicking, scrolling, submit leads, etc.

[igupta]

I didn't see a particular spike in traffic owing to these browsers and I can see some logged in actions as well. But let me do more digging to be sure. Thanks for flagging this!

[Vernon_H]

Hi @Meghan_Powers,

We're also seeing lots of ending ".999" browser versions, my assumption after using the user agent as a breakdown, it seems like some sort of bucketing method. Its just a guess though!

Cheers,

Vernon