Hi, robot: Half of all internet traffic now automated


Traffic from “bad bots”—those created with malicious intent—first surpassed good bot traffic in 2016, Imperva’s research said, and it’s been getting worse. Bad bots comprised 37% of internet traffic in 2024, up from 32% the year prior. Good bots accounted for just 14% of the internet’s traffic.

Bad bots do all kinds of unpleasant things. An increasing number try to hijack peoples’ online accounts, which they often do by “credential stuffing.” This is where a bot takes a password and email address that has been stolen and leaked online, and then tries those credentials across a myriad of services in the hope that its owner will have reused the password elsewhere. These account takeover attacks have skyrocketed lately. Other attacks include scraping data from websites, which is a problem for businesses that don’t want their intellectual property stolen, and also for the individuals who own that data.

Read more…
Source: Malwarebytes Labs


Sign up for our Newsletter
The latest news and insights delivered right to your inbox.


Related:

  • Millions possibly affected by data breach at dermatology giant QualDerm

    March 25, 2026

    Dermatology management services giant QualDerm suffered a cyberattack in late 2025 which saw it lose sensitive personal and healthcare data on more than three million people. The company is now notifying affected individuals by mail, noting in a breach notification letter that between December 23 and 24, 2025, a threat actor managed to access “a limited ...

  • AI Drives Cyber Attacks That Unfold in Minutes

    March 24, 2026

    Artificial intelligence is speeding up timelines for cyber attacks, a new report has found, creating what the authors call a widening “cybersecurity speed gap” between bad actors and defense efforts. The report from Booz Allen Hamilton, published this month, shows that cyber criminals are now moving from initial access to broader system compromise in less than ...

  • Russian initial access broker who fed ransomware crews gets 81 months in US prison

    March 24, 2026

    A Russian national who sold the keys to corporate networks faces nearly seven years in a US prison after prosecutors tied his handiwork to a string of ransomware attacks costing victims millions of dollars. Aleksei Volkov, 26, was sentenced to 81 months behind bars for his role as an initial access broker, a behind-the-scenes operator who ...

  • Google Authenticator: The Hidden Mechanisms of Passwordless Authentication

    March 23, 2026

    Passwordless authentication is often presented as the end of account takeover. But to understand the real threat landscape, we need to examine how passwordless is actually deployed in the real world. Attackers do not break protocols in theory. They target the most common implementations, the places where usability, scale and architecture intersect. Focusing on one of ...

  • CVE-2026-3055: Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway Out-of-Bounds Read

    March 23, 2026

    On March 23, 2026, Citrix published a security advisory for a critical vulnerability affecting their NetScaler ADC (formerly Citrix ADC) and NetScaler Gateway (formerly Citrix Gateway) products. This vulnerability, CVE-2026-3055, which is classified as an out-of-bounds read and holds a CVSS score of 9.3, allows unauthenticated remote attackers to leak potentially sensitive information from the appliance’s ...

  • Phishing campaign abuses Microsoft Azure Monitor alerts

    March 23, 2026

    Microsoft Azure Monitor is the latest in the long line of legitimate tools being abused in phishing attacks. If you are used to getting notifications from this platform, be careful, as the emails are quite convincing and relatively difficult to spot. Microsoft Azure Monitor is a cloud-based service that collects and analyzes data from applications and ...