According to an annual Bad Bot Report, bad bot traffic has dominated the internet, hitting a new high of 47.4% of all online activity, while human-generated traffic has declined to its lowest level in eight years. Bad bot traffic has steadily increased to 30.2% of internet activity, a 2.5% rise over the previous year.
Advanced bad bots accounted for 51.2% of all bad bot traffic, a huge increase from 25.9%. The report recorded an increase in account takeover assaults, which have turned login screens into a new battleground. Account takeover assaults increased by 155%. While 15% of all login attempts across sectors were classified as account takeover attempts. Furthermore, APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) were constantly targeted by malicious bots, accounting for 17% of all API assaults. Another 35% of account takeover assaults targeted APIs explicitly.
The report also highlights the industries that are most vulnerable to bot assaults. The travel sector was the most targeted by bot assaults, accounting for 24.7% of all attacks. Retail came in second with 21%, while financial services saw 12.7% of the attacks. With 58.7% and 47.7%, respectively, the gaming and telecoms industries had the largest share of harmful bot traffic on their websites and applications.
When looking at the worldwide scene, the data indicates that numerous nations had levels of problematic bot traffic that exceeded the global average of 30.2%. Germany led the way with 68.6%, followed by Ireland with 45.1% and Singapore at 43.1%. The U.S. also outperformed the norm, with a bot traffic rate of 32.1%. The nasty bots are also claimed to favor Mobile Safari as their browser. One in every five malicious bots utilized Mobile Safari, up 16.1%.
We decided to do our own survey to find out where all of this bot and spam traffic is coming from. As to be expected, our numbers indicate a shift in origination countries, with China’s ever thirst of scrape data, coming in at number one, followed close behind with India’s phone farms that are all over the place.
Russia came in third, followed by Brazil and the US coming in the fifth spot.