Bots are taking over the internet. Or at least, of its traffic, as Imperva has revealed in its latest annual Bad Bort Report, where data is collected on this phenomenon that is undoubtedly on the rise: bot technology and automated traffic have no brakes. The data indicates that 47.4% of all Internet traffic came from bots in the last year, according to this new report, which is an increase of 5.1% compared to 2021.
As if that were not enough, human trafficking, with 52.6%, decreased to its lowest level in eight years. Another trend revealed by the document is that for the fourth consecutive year, the volume of malicious bot traffic has grown, thus reaching 30.2% (2.5% more than in 2021). Malicious automated software applications capable of high-speed abuse, misuse, and attacks fall into this category.
A bot farm
Other sources
Added to this threatening increase in automated traffic is that the bots are getting better and better, since for the first time more than half of these artificial Internet users are of the “advanced” type, according to Imperva’s classification, while the previous year so they only represented 26% of the total bots
Furthermore, bots have especially intensified their account takeover attacks, which increased by 155% in 2022 and already accounted for 15% of all login attempts in the last 12 months. On the other hand, 17% of all API attacks came from malicious bots abusing business logic.
As for the most affected sectors, these have been travel (24.7%), retail trade (21%) and financial services (12.7%), which have been the main target. On the other hand, regarding the traffic of malicious bots, the majority of these have circulated through games (58.7%) and telecommunications (47.7%).
Germany is by far the country with the most malicious bot traffic compared to the usual ones (68.6% of the total), followed by Ireland (45.1%) and Singapore (43.1%). With all this, Imperva’s report shows that the network is being flooded with increasingly malicious and advanced bots.
