TECH NEWS – Nearly half of all international Internet traffic is not from humans, and a high percentage of that traffic can lead to malicious activity, which doesn’t sound good.

Imperva, a cybersecurity company, has produced the 2024 Bad Bot Report. According to their report, bots account for 49.6% of all Internet traffic. That doesn’t sound too bad, but 32% of that traffic is caused by “bad bots”! According to Nanhi Singh, General Manager of App Security at Imperva, they are a pervasive and growing threat across all industries. From website scraping to malicious (unauthorized) account takeovers, spamming and denial of service attacks, bots are hurting companies’ financial results.

According to Imperva, the percentage of bad bots in Internet traffic varies from country to country (it is not clear whether the percentage is of total traffic or of bots, as they say), with Ireland at 71%, Germany at 67.5% and Mexico at 42.8%. Among the sectors, gaming was the most affected, with bots accounting for 57.2% of traffic (but here the proportion of bad bots is not known). Non-human traffic rates were 24.4% in the income sector, 20.7% in the travel sector, and only 15.7% in the financial sector.

According to Imperva, the more sophisticated bad bots, which can mimic human behavior and evade defenses designed for them, were most prevalent on legal and government, entertainment, and financial services sites. Singh said that as more AI-powered tools reach users, bots will become ubiquitous. As a result, companies will need to invest in bot management and application programming interface security tools to manage the threat of malicious automated traffic.

We could also look at this from an energy perspective. A lot of energy is consumed by bots chasing each other around the Internet and training each other. Ironically, perhaps artificial intelligence could be the solution to bad bots and nonsense content.

Source: PCGamer, Imperva