Malicious bot attack?

[AMHC]

Several of our websites have experienced a major direct load traffic spike in the last 30 days - roughly 40K new visitors for each site. The bots are emulating IE9 and appear to be hitting our home page and bouncing 100% of the time. The traffic is double our usual volume, or more. Our bounce rates, conversion rate, page views, etc have suffered accordingly. The volume hasn't affected site performance, yet.

Since the traffic is direct load, I can't see this being a negative SEO attack. Plus, our search visibility for everything but our brands is abysmal - there aren't any real rankings to tank.

Our engineers are saying that the IP addresses are diverse, and they aren't seeing any pattern. I also checked GA for traffic locations, and we aren't seeing anything unusual from overseas.It appears that the attack is US based.

Has anyone seen this before?

[RyanPurkey]

Have you tried digging deeper into the type of browser and OS they're emulating?  Chances are you could get a pretty precise block on just their activity if you match up their browser, screen dimension, OS, versions, etc without affecting any other users.

[kwoolf]

I would strongly recommend Cloudflare to address this type of problem. They have massive data on malicious sources and offer tools to mitigate attacks like you're facing.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Google analytics has issue with ghost referrals and find out what the referral name is parking in the block it in GA

UA numbers ending in two and three are not effected for some reason

You're hosting company can update  software in order to make this stop

hope this helps

Tom

[BlueprintMarketing]

try

http://www.distilnetworks.com

http://sucuri.net/website-firewall/

https://incapsula.com

or

imperva.com

Stop bot attack resulting in a more secure website. Stop bots

[KyleEaves]

I have been experiencing this on my site as well. Just curious if you were still receiving this kind of traffic since it has been a few months?

Recently there have been one or two times throughout the day where I see a huge spike in direct traffic. As you mentioned, the GA numbers seem to suffer but as long as this does not impact my rankings or site performance I'm not too worried. I too am concerned that this is more than just an annoyance and possibly reason for concern.

I've had other sites show up on GA as sending tons of referral traffic and figured it was just spam, but not sure of the benefit to a spammer of sending ghost direct traffic unless it is some kind of negative SEO attack. Would love to find out.