“The Rise of Malicious Bots: Imperva’s Bad Bot Report 2023”

Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – Internet traffic is controlled by automatic robots that perform various tasks repeatedly or are called ‘bots’. This fact risks increasing cyber attacks on the internet.

At least that’s according to the latest report ‘Imperva Bad Bot Report 2023’. According to reports, as much as 47.4% of traffic on the internet is controlled by bots. The increase was 5.1% year-on-year (YoY).

At the same time, the proportion of internet traffic that is carried out organically by humans has decreased to 52.6%. This is the lowest level for the last 8 years.

Bot traffic basically spreads on website access and applications that are carried out by robots. In general, this can be seen as positive and practical, especially for bot traffic that acts as a digital assistant.

However, bots that are malicious or insecure also have a similar function. If a malicious virus is inserted, a useful bot can be the most effective virus spreader.

As a result, bots can be used to attack applications, websites, as well as APIs or application creation tools TechRadarMonday (15/5/2023).

In the worst case scenario, bots can be used by cybercriminals to mine and steal data, commit fraudulent transactions, and insert malicious viruses.

According to an Imperva report, by 2022, bad bots or ‘bad bots’ will contribute to 2.5% of all internet traffic. Now the percentage has risen to 30.2%.

The report also says this is the 4th year in a row, where bad bots have grown significantly on the internet. More than half of bad bot traffic, or 51.2%, comes from sophisticated bots whose way of communicating is completely natural, aka human-like.

“This trend is quite worrying for business people. Many sophisticated bots use certain techniques, so they can disguise themselves as humans,” said the research team.

“Bad bots can evade detection by surfing through random IPs, logging in through anonymous proxies, and changing identities,” the researchers concluded.

So far, the distribution of bad bots has been mostly detected in Germany, Ireland, Singapore and the United States. As a result, the retail, advertising and financial industries are increasingly being attacked.

(fab/fab)