2/3rd of Web Traffic is Bots

The security outfit Incapsula has found out that about 62% of all website traffic today is generated by bots. There was a 21% rise on 2012 figure where bots accounted for a bit over 50% of the traffic.

Of course, some of those automated software instruments are malicious, but the rapid growth in traffic was for good bots used by search engines to crawl sites to index their content. Other types of bots are employed by analytics companies to provide feedback about how a portal performs, or by others to carry out specific tasks like helping the online archive preserve material before it’s removed.

The security company observed almost 1.5 billion bot visits within a 3-month period from the 20,000 websites operated by its customers. Regardless of the overall growth in bot activity, the company pointed out that many of the traditional malicious uses of the tools are now less common. There had been a 75% drop in the frequency spam links were being automatically posted.

In addition, it had seen a 10% drop in hacking tool bot activities. Those include the use of code to distribute malware, steal credit cards and hijack and deface sites. Another new trend was an 8% growth in the use of so-called “impersonator bots”. This classification includes software which masquerades as being from a search engine or other legal agent and manages to fool security measures. Such bots are custom-made to carry out a specific activity like a DDoS attack, forcing a server to crash taking a site or service offline by flooding it with traffic or to steal corporate secrets.

The developing good bots show that the legitimate services were sampling the net more frequently, which can allow search engines to add breaking news stories to its results quicker, for instance.