Bad bots, bad bots, whatcha gonna do? Target e-commerce, the travel industry, media and online marketplaces, that’s what.Those are the top four verticals attacked by bots in the last year, according to
data released on Wednesday from Radware, with e-commerce accounting for the most activity.
In 2019, overall bad-bot traffic grew by 26 percent, rising to account for a quarter (24.5 percent) of total internet traffic. Automated attacks on mobile phones and APIs are rising too, with bad bots accounting for 15.4 percent of the total traffic on mobile devices.
Web applications are the most exploited attack surface across industries. In 2019, 35 percent of the total traffic were bad bots on web applications, an increase of 10 percent year-over-year. And on a related note, attacks on APIs have ramped up in the last few years. In 2019, 16.6 percent of the traffic on APIs were bad bots, rising from 14.3 percent in 2018.
“Despite their rapid and widespread implementation, APIs remain poorly protected and are a vulnerable surface for automated threats,” according to Radware. “Personally identifiable information (PII), payment-card details and business-critical services are at risk due to bot attacks on APIs.”
Radware noted that cybercriminals use bots in many ways: Sophisticated bots built to circumvent security measures and take over user accounts by mimicking human behavior; denial-of-service bots that prevent online checkouts or take down specific pages; bots built for mobile environments; those that exploit vulnerabilities in applications and APIs; and custom, targeted bots that are built to attack specific companies or competitors. What that bot activity looks like tends to vary from vertical to vertical, according to the analysis.
