OPINION: Has Blogger Been Hacked...By Russia?

We at Niagara's Watercooler love what we do, and we have plenty of fun putting together various things that we hope you all enjoy. But like most websites, we are also a business and we watch our numbers all of the time. We have enjoyed a steady increase in numbers for everything we do, but the increase we got yesterday afternoon and today was a bit much.

WE ARE ONLY TELLING YOU WHAT WE NOTICED. WE ARE NOT IMPLYING ANYTHING MORE THAN WHAT HAS ACTUALLY HAPPENED. WE ARE JUST ASKING QUESTIONS.

Today (Sunday March 12, 2017), Craig and I were having our daily conversation about how awesome our numbers have become when he brought up an interesting question. Craig said:

"Why do we have 10 times as many hits for today than we have ever had before?"

We get some good traffic, but a closer look at the numbers shows an significant spike in traffic over the course of the weekend. So I did a little research and saw that we are starting to get a lot of traffic from ... Russia. No, I am not kidding.

We are getting so much traffic from Russia that in one 24-hour period Russia suddenly became the second largest supplier of traffic to Niagara's Watercooler (We are huge in Germany for some reason). Craig suggested that my use of Trump as a tag is what has caused this. So I did some more research, and that research is what lead to this article.

I went through and looked at all of our past content (which took some considerable amount of time) and found no single article that had experienced a sudden boost in traffic. Then I checked out all of the articles where I used Trump as a tag (I'm the complainer, so I use Trump as a tag and Craig does not) and there were three. Not one of those articles has seen a recent and significant boost in traffic.

I used Russia as a tag only once and that article flopped badly (even I swing and miss once in a while). So what happened?

That is where this article ends. It just seems strange that Russia and hacking have been in the news so much lately, and then our little website shows a sudden boost in Russian activity that does not seem to exist in reality. So we pose the question: Has Blogger been hacked by Russia?

We have no clue and we have no way of really finding out. But to our new Russian readers we say dobro pozhalovat'! And if Vlad himself is reading our stuff, then it was nice knowing everyone.

George N Root III is a Lockport resident who has absolutely nothing against Russia or anyone else. He does not believe that Russia is watching Niagara's Watercooler, nor does he think that the United States government is tracking the Wat