The internet, which has been in our lives for more than 30 years, is at the center of almost everything. On the other hand, the share of people in internet usage traffic continues to decrease every year.
Remember when the internet used to be a place where people discovered information and shared it with others? Maybe there are even those who remember Microsoft Encarta. Those days are fast fading, according to cybersecurity software and services company Imperva.
Half of internet traffic comes from bots
In its latest annual report, the firm found that a staggering 47.4 percent of all Internet traffic in 2022 came from bots. That’s a 5.1 percent increase compared to the 42.3 percent bad bot traffic observed a year ago. What a waste of resources, right?
Imperva divides bot traffic into two categories: bad bot traffic and good bot traffic. Simply put, bad bots are bots that run malicious automated tasks. They can be used to scrape data from websites or create DDoS attacks. Some bad bots can even facilitate fraud and theft. Bad bots can be further categorized. In 2022, most bad bots (51.2 percent) were considered advanced in terms of sophistication, compared to basic (33.4 percent) and medium (15.4 percent) bots.
Gaming sites, telecom and ISPs, legal and government sites, retail pages, financial services, community and travel sites were most affected by bad bots, according to Imperva. The data also shows that malicious bots target sites in the US the most. It is stated that less than half the number of attacks in the USA were made in Australia, the second most targeted country.
On the other hand, good bots are defined as those that perform useful tasks for search engines, such as indexing websites or monitoring website performance. While bot traffic is increasing, people’s internet traffic continues its downward trend. According to Imperva, traffic fell from 57.7 percent in 2021 to 52.6 percent last year. The highest point in this area was recorded at 62.8% in 2019 but has been falling since then.
