07/23/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 07/23/2024 04:39
Imperva, a Thales company, that protects critical applications, Application Programing Interfaces (APIs), and data, recently announced the release of the 2024 Imperva Bad Bot Report, a global analysis of automated bot traffic across the internet.
Bots are software applications that perform automated tasks over the internet. They can be marked either as a good or a bad bot. Good bots are used for productive purposes like gathering data for search engines, chatbots for customer service or commercial purposes like finding deals. Bad bots however, are used for malicious purposes to automate attacks like denial-of-service (DDoS), ticket scalping or sabotage gaming sites.
The report found that nearly half of all internet traffic came from bots in 2023 - the highest level Imperva has reported since it began monitoring automated traffic in 2013. For the fifth consecutive year, the proportion of web traffic associated with bad bots rose, reaching 32% globally in 2023, up from 30.2% in 2022, while traffic from human users decreased to 50.4%.
Australia remained in the top three countries targeted by bad bots, representing 8.4% of all bot attacks globally; ranking third behind the USA and the Netherlands. In Australia, bots (good and bad) now make up 36.4% of Australia's internet traffic, underscoring that businesses across the nation still face a threat from malicious and automated traffic. Australia's bad bot traffic grew to 30.2%, an increase of 23.2% year-on-year (YoY)
Reinhart Hansen, Director of Technology, Asia Pacific and Japan, at Imperva, ,a Thales company, stressed the criticality of taking proactive steps against bad bots as they grow in sophistication. "With attackers increasingly exploiting API vulnerabilities and lapses in business logic guardrails, a proactive stance is essential to prevent data breaches, account takeovers, and large-scale data theft. From simple web scraping to malicious account takeover, spam, and denial of service, bots negatively impact an organisation's bottom line by degrading online services and forcing more investment in infrastructure and customer support. Organisations in Australia must proactively confront the menace of bad bots as attackers sharpen their focus on API-related abuses that can lead to compromised accounts and data exfiltration," he added.
Key trends identified in the 2024 Imperva Bad Bot Report include:
Globally, for the second year in a row, gaming (57.2%) experienced the highest proportion of bad bot traffic. This trend mirrors the situation in Australia, where bad bots made up 75.19% of all traffic in the gaming industry. The other two industries which experiences the highest proportion of bad bot traffic are Sports (63.38%), and Healthcare (61.23%).
Additional Information:
"Organisations face substantial financial losses every year due to automated traffic, a concern that cuts across all industries," notes George Lee, Senior Vice President for Asia Pacific and Japan at Imperva. " Automated bots are on track to outnumber human-generated internet traffic, and with the proliferation of AI-powered tools, their presence is becoming increasingly pervasive. It's imperative for enterprises to prioritise investment in bot management and API security solutions to effectively combat the threat posed by malicious automated traffic."