Bots accounted for 47.4% of all internet traffic in 2022, up 5.1 percentage points from 2021. informed Security Magazine citing Imperva’s annual study titled Bad Bot Report 2022released this week. As stated in the publication, human-caused internet traffic dropped 52.6% to its lowest level in eight years.
According to the study, the share of “bad” bots, malicious automated programs that can be used for spam, espionage, DDoS attacks, and hacking of websites, increased for the fourth straight year in internet traffic. In 2022, their share rose to 30.2%, which is 2.5% more than in 2021.
The study also reports that the complexity of “bad” bots has increased. In 2022, these bots classified as “advanced” accounted for 51.2% of all “bad” bot traffic, while in 2021 that figure was 25.9%. Account takeover (ATO) attacks increased by 155% in 2022, and 15% of all login attempts in the last 12 months across all verticals were classified as account takeovers. 17% of all API attacks were carried out by “bad” bots. Additionally, 35% of account-hijacking attacks last year targeted the API directly.
The tourism industry (24.7%), retail (21%) and financial services (12.7%) suffered the most bot attacks. The gaming (58.7%) and telecom (47.7%) segments had the highest percentage of malicious bot traffic on their websites and apps.
In seven of the 13 countries analyzed, malicious bot traffic was above the global average of 30.2%. Top three: Germany (68.6%), Ireland (45.1%) and Singapore (43.1%). In the USA, too, the value was slightly above average at 32.1%.
One in five malicious bots used Mobile Safari as their browser of choice in the past year, up from 16.1% in 2021.
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