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.
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Source: Malwarebytes Labs
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