Bots now make up nearly half of all internet traffic

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https://www.techradar.com/news/bots-now-make-up-nearly-half-of-all-internet-traffic-and-thats-very-bad-news-for-our-security

Bot traffic, and more specifically - bad bot traffic - is hitting new all-time highs, putting everyone’s cybersecurity at risk, new research has claimed. The 2023 Imperva Bad Bot Report found that in 2022, almost half (47.4%) of all internet traffic came from bots, which is a 5.1% increase year-on-year. At the same time, the proportion of human traffic decreased to 52.6%, which is its lowest level in eight years.

Bot traffic is essentially any traffic to a website or an app that wasn’t done by a human. It is generally perceived as a good thing, as it’s essential for digital assistants, search engines, and similar. Bad bots can interact with internet applications the same way legitimate bots (or users) would, and are thus used to attack websites, mobile apps, and APIs, to run campaigns such as web scraping, data mining, brute-force attacks, DDoS, transaction fraud, and more.

Bots now make up nearly half of all internet traffic, and that's very bad news for our security

Advanced bots are growing alongside bad bots

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[vtqhtr413]

Malicious bots make up nearly three-quarters of Internet traffic​

Automated bots are a dime a dozen on the modern Internet, performing a variety of tasks ranging from helpful to harmful. What you may not realize is just how prolific bad bots are, and how much web traffic they account for.

According to fraud control platform Arkose Labs, a staggering 73 percent of Internet traffic to websites and apps measured between January 2023 and September 2023 was related to bots performing malicious activities like SMS toll fraud, scraping, and card testing. Talk about a waste of resources.

The top five bad bot categories in the third quarter included account takeover, scraping, fake account creation, account management, and in-product abuse (inventory hoarding, loyalty points abuse, and the like). These categories were mostly unchanged from Q2, with one exception: in-product abuse replaced card testing.

SMS toll fraud saw the largest quarter-over-quarter increase, up 2,141 percent in Q3 compared to Q2. Attacks on customer support call centers increased 160 percent, the firm observed. From Q1 to Q2, scraping saw the biggest increase at 432 percent.

Malicious bots make up nearly three-quarters of Internet traffic

According to fraud control platform Arkose Labs, a staggering 73 percent of Internet traffic to websites and apps measured between January 2023 and September 2023 was related...

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