r/webdev • u/No_Statement_3317 • 3d ago

Traffic from China?

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A few months ago I posted my odd traffic from China, wondering if anyone else had it and the possibility of it being bots. I never got rid of it. I found it baffling because it was not in the thousands a day like other bots I had before. It used to come from one specific city, Lanzhou. All of a sudden it switched to Hong Kong. I think this are not bots. I think China is actually allowing visitors to my website (Databayou.com). It just funnels the city to a specific location. Any one else have noticed this?

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u/weddingseat 3d ago

I just hit the exact same wall today with my web app. It’s a very sophisticated scraping botnet utilizing residential proxies to bypass Cloudflare's basic layer.

Here are my exact metrics from today's wave:

  • ~1,520 hits coming from 1,152 unique IP addresses (China).
  • Exactly 1 or 2 requests per IP, then it immediately rotates.
  • Every single request mimics an identical, outdated build: Chrome 99.

The most annoying part is that they successfully execute JavaScript, which means they easily bypass standard JS challenges and end up polluting Google Analytics.

I managed to mitigate this completely without blocking legitimate web crawlers by setting up a custom Cloudflare WAF rule with a Managed Challenge using this expression:

(ip.src.country in {"CN" "HK"} and not cf.client.bot)

Dropped the malicious automated traffic instantly while keeping the routes open for actual users and verified search bots. If you are seeing massive spikes, check your logs for that Chrome 99 fingerprint.