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

[PeterParker]

What date did it start on @Meghan_Powers?  DId it start on September 12 2024 for you all as well?  It's odd, but I'd bet some are for sure bots.  However, I've seen instances in the past where Adobe analytics had issues handling user agent properly and mis-classified in wrong buckets for browsers.  It's weird bc w/ the other screenshot of somebody breaking down by user agent- it doesn't seem correct.  I'm very curious as to what Adobe's answer is to this, I want to know if their data collection and processing is the issue or if these are indeed bots.  It almost seems like the majority of the hits from these .999 browsers seem like bots as they have a high bounce rate, low time on site but some of them are different and have a high avg time on site, multi-pageview.  Most all of them coming in on direct.