Over the last few hours, we've seen an increase in requests from New Zealand ISPs.

For comparison, here's the last seven days of requests to Geekzone. You can see the unusual increase today:

These are the top five ISPs during the period from 6AM to 2PM today:

The top three seem to always be in that position, being the largest ISPs in the country. But this seems to be seven times more requests than usual for the same period in other days.

Then Mercury and Starlink appear, when they usually are just a blip.

Looking at the traffic and the IP address distribution, I believe there is a bunch of compromised devices in New Zealand, probably the usual suspects: malware-infested Android streaming boxes bought from AliExpress and cheap routers. These are usually remote-controlled and rented out to companies (good or bad) wanting to use residential IPs to crawl websites or initiate an attack.

So I've enabled captchas on Geekzone. Blame the people who plug these devices into the network.