Approximately 50% of Internet Traffic Bot Related

Published on March 16, 2012 By DrJBHL In Personal Computing

Hankers sent me to Neowin to find this one (I was lazy), so thanks, Hankers. What I found there, and after reading the original at Incapsula truly amazed me. I knew there was bad stuff out there but this much?

Incapsula published research done on 1,000 of its customers (anonymous) and found the following (nice graphics, Incapsula!):

So, 51% of the traffic on these 1,000 sites was bot related. Now, that isn’t all bad. There are ceaseless bot searches being done and they do result in business for these sites. Those comprise 20%. That means 31% weren’t and resulted in either potential or actual damage.

I don’t know the stats for WinCustomize and her sister Stardock sites, but we’ve all seen the “spam”.

What fascinated me more was the second graphic Incapsula produced. This gives an idea what’s being done and how as well as the damage:

All of this causes damage and wastes time and money. Every company (and person) who has a website has to devote time and money to protecting it from the entities in the graphics above. The companies and people also have to know about the risks and how to get rid of any damaging stuff on their sites.

Large companies have IT departments to do that but still, that’s a waste time and money. I won’t even start on damages done to prospective customers. Small companies and individuals trying to get started or to keep their customers are hurt too: Perhaps relatively more.

At any rate it drives the cost of doing business up, and that is passed on to the customer to some degree. The customer hurt by information/identity loss can be damaged a good deal more.

Here’s hoping a truly effective technology can be developed to filter the damagers from even getting near their intended targets.

Sources:

http://www.incapsula.com/the-incapsula-blog/blog-2012/114-what-google-doesnt-show-you-31-of-website-traffic-can-harm-your-business

http://www.neowin.net/news/study-51-percent-of-web-traffic-comes-from-bots

Comments

Hankers

on Mar 16, 2012

Amazing!!!!

Fistalis

on Mar 16, 2012

The fact that Incapusla sells website security solutions doesn't make you question the bias of such a report?

Sure there's lots of malicious traffic out there.. but I think this is an exaggeration in order to drum up business.

I anonymously polled 1000 people and found that 51% wanna steal your wallet... so buy my wallet chains.

tetleytea

on Mar 16, 2012

I agree, it's an exaggeration of how much traffic has malicious intent. For that matter, even going by those graphs only 2% of internet traffic is bot-related, in my books. Granted, in the phpBB forums I own it's more like 90%, so it is significant. More and more internet traffic is web services related, such as RESTful API--and an increasingly large number of businesses openly offer REST services to provide you with their product and pricing information. Amazon is the biggest example of that: you can code a Python script in 5 minutes to make your computer transmit some XML and query Amazon's product and pricing info. Malicious? No...they WANT that. That's how they increase business. A lot of the REST services out there are nothing more than a thinly veiled interface to let you run SQL on their database servers without them having to tunnel a direct port to their database through the firewall to the outside world. It's no secret that well over 90% of the SQL traffic out there is non-interactive.

Frankly, I think 51% of WAN traffic being computer-to-computer is too low (okay, 100% of it is, but you know what I mean...). And only 20% of internet traffic comes from "good bots"? Come on.... In my book I don't consider something a "bot" just because it's computer-to-computer, and certainly it's not malicious as the term "bot" tends to imply. It's a new trend in technology, and it's only going to go up. As we know, as technology increases, that increases both the good and the bad.

You know...come to think of it...I saw another statistic out there that said over 50% of internet traffic out there is now streaming audio/video. That would have a human behind it (unless it's from DOS attacks). So at least one of these guys has to be wrong.

Wizard1956

on Mar 16, 2012

we’ve all seen the “spam

Now that you mention it, at first glance I thought this was going to be a thread about some online dating service for robots.

-WhiteElk

on Mar 16, 2012

Another way to look at it is that about half of the internet, is being utilized to track and rob you.

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