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.
www.techspot.com
