A new study by security firm Barracuda shows that half of all internet traffic worldwide is currently generated by bots.

According to a new report from security firm Barracuda, half of all internet traffic is data from bots. Furthermore, Barracuda concludes that thirty percent are generated by malicious bots.

Social bots

Anyone on social media has recently become very aware of the existence of bots. X and Instagram in particular seem to be competing to see who has the most automated porn accounts on their channel. The latter has now even started a paid test project in the fight against bots.

Of course, it goes beyond accounts named Hanna that have no followers and always have a specific link in the bio. Bots can be found everywhere. They will soon even be available in the form of celebrities on WhatsApp and Messenger.

Bad bot

According to the Barracuda report, there is a clear difference between good and bad bots. In the first category you will mainly find the helpful variant: on search engines or as a chat assistant on websites.

Bad bots range from unauthorized data scraping to full-scale cyber attacks. Almost three quarters of Internet traffic from malicious bots comes from the USA. This dubious top three is completed by the other regional members, the United Arab Emirates with twelve percent and Saudi Arabia with six percent.

The United States also appears to be the most popular destination for malicious bot traffic, at 67 percent. Barracuda identifies two similar sources of this malicious traffic, Microsoft Azure and AWS cloud services. According to the report, this is because it is easy to set up a free account and then use it to produce fraudulent bots.

Another striking fact is that about a third of traffic from bad bots comes from private IP addresses. The conclusion here is that many bot makers hide behind someone else’s secretly taken IP address.

This brings us seamlessly to the report’s warning. Malicious bot groups are becoming increasingly sophisticated and bold. Barracuda therefore recommends investing properly in WAAP security, which stands for it Web application and API protection.

The good news is that the number of malicious bots was 39 two years ago. In any case, this is a positive development.