Study finds nearly half of the internet’s traffic is ‘high-risk’ bots

Akamai has published a new 2024 report on web traffic and found that 42% of all traffic is generated by bots, and considerable percentages of these bots in sub-sections of the internet are “high risk“.

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The newly published study focuses on “scraping bots,” which are designed to locate and harvest data from content that is then used in future cyber-crime-related endeavors. Notably, Akamai is one of the biggest content delivery networks on the planet, with its place being alongside Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services. As for the report, Akamai found the e-commerce section of the internet is plagued with “high-risk” bots and is the most affected industry on the internet. 65% of the discovered bots in this sector were deemed to have malicious intent.

So, who benefits from these bot scrapers? These types of bots are commonly used by competitors within markets to gather data on their competition, such as prices, inventory lists, descriptions, and other valuable data. With this data and likely the involvement of a generative AI tool, the competitor is then able to implement changes that target competing businesses, thus affecting the bottom line of both businesses.

Akamai says it’s not just competing businesses using bot scrapers but scammers as well, which will use the scraped data for nefarious means such as creating fake websites, impersonation tactics, and blackmail. On a much less nefarious level, bot scrapers can simply be used to degrade the performance of a website, impact search engine metrics, and increase the load on servers – driving up costs.