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:
- Critical Vulnerability in Harbor Enables Privilege Escalation from Zero to Admin (CVE-2019-16097)
September 18, 2019
Aviv Sasson, a security researcher from the cloud division of Unit 42, has identified a critical vulnerability in a widespread cloud native registry called Harbor. The vulnerability allows attackers to take over Harbor registries by sending them a malicious request. The maintainers of Harbor released a patch that closes this critical security hole. Versions 1.7.6 and 1.8.3 include this fix. Unit 42 has ...
- Smominru Botnet Indiscriminately Hacked Over 90,000 Computers Just Last Month
September 18, 2019
Insecure Internet-connected devices have aided different types of cybercrime for years, most common being DDoS and spam campaigns. But cybercriminals have now shifted toward a profitable scheme where botnets do not just launch DDoS or spam—they mine cryptocurrencies as well. Smominru, an infamous cryptocurrency-mining and credential-stealing botnet, has become one of the rapidly spreading computer viruses ...
- Assessing the impact of protection from web miners
September 17, 2019
Kaspersky Lab present the results of evaluating the positive economic and environmental impact of blocking web miners with Kaspersky products. The total power saving can be calculated with known accuracy using the formula <w>·N, where <w> is the average value of the increase in power consumption of the user device during web mining, and N is ...
- The Legend of Adwind: A Commodity RAT Saga in Eight Parts
September 17, 2019
In early 2012, a developer started selling the first of the Adwind family, Java-based remote access tools (RATs), called “Frutas.” In the ensuing years, it has been rebranded at least seven times. Its other names have included Adwind, UnReCoM, Alien Spy, JSocket, JBifrost, UnknownRat, and JConnectPro. The Adwind RAT family remains prevalent in the wild. Palo ...
- Astaroth Spy Trojan Uses Facebook, YouTube Profiles to Cover Tracks
September 13, 2019
Facebook and YouTube profiles are at the heart of an ongoing phishing campaign spreading the Astaroth trojan, bent on the eventual exfiltration of sensitive information. The attack is sophisticated in that it uses normally trusted sources as cover for malicious activities – thus evading usually effective email and network security layers. The attack starts with an ...
- Hacking LED Wristbands: A ‘Lightning’ Recap of RF Security Basics
September 13, 2019
Early this year, we published a security analysis of industrial radio remote controllers. In that research, we examined different vulnerabilities in the implementation of radio frequency (RF) communication and the possible impact of an attack on these weaknesses. We believe that RF security research is of great importance especially in light of the realization that a growing ...