Almost half of all global Internet traffic in 2023 was generated by bots.
About it says in the Imperva Bad Bot Report by Thales.
This is the highest level of bot activity since the start of automated traffic monitoring in 2013.
Some bots perform useful functions. For example, they index web pages. But most are created for malicious purposes.
The percentage of web traffic associated with malicious bots is gradually increasing. In 2022, it was 30.2%, and in 2023 it was already 32%.
The report also shows that traffic from real users decreased to 50.4% in 2023. Automated traffic costs companies billions of dollars annually due to attacks on websites, APIs, and applications.
Nandi Singh, general manager of application security at Imperva, a Thales company, spoke about the growing threat. He said:
«Bots are one of the most widespread and growing threats facing every industry. They have a negative impact on an organization’s bottom line,» said Thales’ General Manager of Security.
The report identified several key trends. On average, global bot malware traffic reached 32%. Most of all:
Account hijacking attacks have also become more frequent.
The report also warns about the growth of AI-related bots. It was found that the rapid adoption of generative artificial intelligence and large language models has led to an increase in the number of simple bots to 39.6% in 2023 from 33.4% in 2022.
In addition, 17% of them were malicious bots that searched for system vulnerabilities to gain access to sensitive data or user accounts.
The largest share of malicious bots is present in the following areas:
These data and trends indicate one thing: we can expect an even greater increase in bot traffic in the future. Bots are leading to an increase in the number of attacks on accounts, including attacks on application programming interfaces.