Bots now account for half of global internet traffic and 'bad bots' nearly one third

Chalk this up as further evidence of the impending demise of civilisation, along with the climate, large language models and the increasingly ubiquitous implementation of the Oxford comma. Now it's being reported that very nearly half of all internet traffic is accounted for by bots.

That's according to the 2024 Bad Bot Report by cybersecurity specialist Imperva, via SecurityBrief. The headline figure has bots representing 49.6% of all internet traffic. Arguably even worse is the 32% of all traffic associated with so called «bad bots.»

«Bots are one of the most pervasive and growing threats facing every industry. From simple web scraping to malicious account takeover, spam, and denial of service, bots negatively impact an organisation's bottom line,» Nanhi Singh, General Manager, Application Security at Imperva, said, presumably with an apathetic, defeated sigh.

Imperva found that bad bot traffic varied fairly dramatically by geography. For instance, Ireland topped the charts at 71%, with Germany at 67.5% and and Mexico notching up 42.8%. It's not clear if that means 71% of all Irish internet traffic is bad bots or rather if 71% of Irish bot traffic is bad. To be sure (apologies), that's a lot of bad bots.

What's more, we gamers were not left out of the fun. In fact, according to Imperva the prevalence of bot traffic within gaming was deemed the greatest among all «sectors» at 57.2% of traffic. Go us! That said, Imperva didn't break down the good-to-bad bot ratio for gaming.

Retail bots achieved a mere 24.4% of traffic, with travel bots representing 20.7% of that sector's traffic and financial services relegated to the must-try-harder-to-assimilate-humans category at just 15.7% of traffic.

Imperva further reckons that «advanced» bad bots, that are said to be capable of mimicking human behaviour and evading defences, were most common on Law and Government, Entertainment, and Financial Services websites.

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