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:
- Chaotic Eclipse strikes again with another worrying Windows security flaw
May 18, 2026
Threat actors could escalate privileges and gain SYSTEM access on a fully patched Windows 11 device thanks to an unpatched vulnerability which allegedly should have been fixed years ago, new reports have claimed. A researcher with the alias Chaotic Eclipse recently disclosed a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) exploit for a zero-day vulnerability they named “MiniPlasma”. In a new GitHub entry, ...
- NYC Health + Hospitals says hackers stole medical data affecting at least 1.8m people
May 18, 2026
New York public health provider NYC Health + Hospitals says a months-long data breach that allowed hackers to steal personal data, medical records, and fingerprints scans affects at least 1.8 million people. NYCHHC is the largest public health system in the United States and provides healthcare to over a million New Yorkers, the majority of whom are uninsured or ...
- Scammers are targeting World Cup fans
May 16, 2026
We’re less than a month away from the biggest sporting event of the year, the FIFA World Cup, and scammers are already busy stealing money, passwords, and other sensitive data from fans and visitors, experts have warned. Kaspersky has published a breakdown of the different scam techniques cybercriminals are using to target football fans as they ...
- Patch time for Cisco SD-WAN admins as vendor drops yet another make-me-admin zero-day
May 15, 2026
Cisco admins face emergency patch duty after Switchzilla disclosed a max-severity make-me-admin bug affecting Catalyst SD-WAN Controller and Manager. Switchzilla dropped an advisory for CVE-2026-20182 (10.0) on Thursday, saying that both components, formerly known as vSmart and vManage, were vulnerable in all deployment types, and that fixes were available. The bug allows unauthenticated remote attackers to bypass authentication and ...
- Hackers have breached tank readers at US gas stations
May 15, 2026
US officials suspect Iranian hackers are behind a series of breaches of systems that monitor the amount of fuel in storage tanks serving gas stations in multiple states, according to multiple sources briefed on the activity. The hackers responsible have exploited automatic tank gauge (ATG) systems that were sitting online and unprotected by passwords, allowing them in some cases ...
- ShinyHunters: Cyber Criminal Group Attacks Learning Management System
May 15, 2026
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is providing this Public Service Announcement (PSA) to warn of potential future impacts related to a cyber-attack that affected an online Learning Management System (LMS), resulting in an interruption of service to educational institutions and students across the country. The LMS platform is now fully operational. ShinyHunters (SH) — which ...