Cyber security firm Imperva, which develops a number of products to protect digital data alongside DDOS and bot protection, released a new report that claims 37% of all internet traffic is made up of bad bots.
The report notes that in 2024 “automated traffic surpassed human activity, accounting for 51% of all web traffic.” The company claims this was largely due to the adoption of AI and large language models.
Additionally, it shared that “bad bot activity has risen for the sixth consecutive year, with malicious bots now making up 37% of all internet traffic, a sharp increase from 32% in 2023.”
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The bad bots are being used for a number of different activities including price scraping, content scraping, account takeover, account creation, credit card fraud, denial-of-service, gift card balance checking and abuse, denial of inventory, scalping, and seat spinning.
Specifically in the entertainment industry, it shared it was seeing bad bots being used in account takeover, price scraping, inventory scraping, and scalping.
However, as shared by Twitch CEO Dan Clancy earlier this week, bots are also being used to commit fraud by duping streaming companies in order to extract ad revenue. Clancy said in a recent interview, “There’s third parties that do it. And especially when you get to ads, they try to view bot for ads. They view bot for all sorts of things.”
The interesting thing is the view botting isn’t always like the streamer is complicit even. … There isn’t one big one. Most of the view botting and most of the fraud is not on a big streamer. It’s on a small streamer, but thousands of them. … Because if they can create a thousand bogus accounts and then they create view bots then they can create bogus revenue,” he explained.
What do you make of this report from Imperva?