06 October 2021

Almost 40% of all traffic on the internet is “bad bot” activity, according to a report published by Barracuda Networks. Automated bots, including those from search engines and social media networks, make up 64% of all internet traffic. The Bot attacks: Top Threats and Trends report found that only a quarter of this was “good bot” activity - nearly two-fifths (39%) were from “bad bots.”

The report said these bad bots included basic web scrapers, attack scripts, and advanced persistent bots. “These advanced bots try their best to evade standard defences and attempt to perform their malicious activities under the radar. In our dataset, the most common of these persistent bots were ones that went after e-commerce applications and login portals,” the report said.