Bad Bots Now Make Up 20 Percent of Web Traffic

So-called "bad bots," tasked with performing denial-of-service (DoS) attacks or other malicious activities like automatically publishing fake content or reviews, are estimated to make up roughly 37.9 percent of all internet traffic. "In 2018, one in five website requests -- 20.4 percent -- of traffic was generated by bad bots alone," reports ZDNet, citing Distil Networks' latest bot report, "Bad Bot Report 2019: The Bot Arms Race Continues." From the report: According to Distil Networks' latest bot report, the financial sector is the main target for such activity, followed by ticketing, the education sector, government websites, and gambling. Based on the analysis of hundreds of billions of bad bot requests over 2018, simple bots, which are easy to detect and defend against, accounted for 26.4 percent of bad bot traffic. Meanwhile, 52.5 percent came from those considered to be "moderately" sophisticated, equipped with the capability to use headless browser software as well as JavaScript to conduct illicit activities. A total of 73.6 percent of bad bots are classified as Advanced Persistent Bots (APBs), which are able to cycle through random IP addresses, switch their digital identities, and mimic human behavior. Amazon is the leading ISP for bad bot traffic origins. In total, 18 percent of bad bot traffic came from the firm's services, a jump from 10.62 percent in 2017. Almost 50 percent of bad bots use Google Chrome as their user agent and 73.6 percent of bad bot traffic was recorded as originating from data centers, down from 82.7 percent in 2017. The United States outstrips all other countries as a generator of bad bots. In total, 53.4 percent of bad bot traffic came from the US, followed by the Netherlands and China. The most blocked country by IP is Russia, together with Ukraine and India.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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