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:

  • CVE-2026-0826: How an Old Bug Can Feed AI-Powered Impersonation

    June 1, 2026

    Rapid7 Senior Principal Security Researcher Stephen Fewer discovered CVE-2026-0826, a critical unauthenticated stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability affecting multiple HP Poly VoIP devices. If you’ve been around vulnerability research long enough, the bug class here is going to feel very familiar. And interestingly enough, that’s exactly why it deserves attention. These older exploitation primitives never really went ...

  • Containers on fire: from container escapes to supply chain attacks

    June 1, 2026

    Modern infrastructures universally rely on containerization to deploy applications, scale services, and build cloud platforms. The use of Docker, Kubernetes, and similar technologies has become the corporate standard for efficient automation. However, as containers grow in popularity, so does the interest of malicious actors — a trend Kaspersky actively track in our research into advanced ...

  • Physical attacks on major crypto holders is on the rise as ‘Whales’ are targeted for kidnapping News

    May 30, 2026

    Cryptocurrency executives and whales alike are increasingly being targeted by a mix of criminal elements worldwide, even as security continues to be beefed up to protect the not-so-anonymous owners of cryptocurrency. The transparency introduced to the crypto world is putting some coin-collectors at risk of physical harm, and even kidnapping. But many are also being outed by ...

  • Dutch cops wrest 17M devices from mystery botnet’s clutches

    May 29, 2026

    Dutch police say they dismantled a large botnet this week comprising at least 17 million infected devices. After being tipped off by a researcher at the Netherlands’ National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NL), police began an investigation, which resulted in the discovery of 200 servers underpinning the botnet’s infrastructure located in the country. Cybercrime specialists at The Hague ...

  • No fix yet for critical RCE bug in open-source Git service Gogs – exploit module is out

    May 29, 2026

    There’s a huge hole and no one is patching it thus far. A critical, remote code execution (RCE) bug in Gogs, a popular open-source self-hosted Git service, can be exploited by any authenticated user – no special privileges required – on a default installation to fully compromise vulnerable servers, steal credentials and multi-factor authentication secrets, ...

  • Microsoft under fire for threatening security researcher with criminal investigation

    May 29, 2026

    After a security researcher published a series of unpatched bugs in Microsoft products, along with code to exploit them, the company is now threatening to take legal action and call the cops on them. Microsoft’s veiled threat reignites a long-running argument over what responsibility, if any, security researchers have to disclose vulnerabilities affecting large and ...