According to information security company Barracuda Networks, in the period from January to June 2021, 64% of Internet traffic was generated by automated means. Most of the bot traffic came from servers in the public clouds AWS and Microsoft Azure (about the same amount).
The contribution of potentially dangerous robotic programs - the simplest web scrapers, scripts for carrying out attacks and advanced bots that can bypass typical protection means - in the total stream (PDF) to about 40%. That being said, the latter have mostly targeted e-commerce applications and sign-in portals.
The largest number of sources of malicious bot traffic was recorded in the North American region. Here they were located mainly in public data centers. In European countries, cybercriminals preferred to host their bots at VPS providers or on home networks.
In their report, the researchers also noted that unlike the "good" bots (crawlers, social networking programs, monitoring tools), which don't really care about the time of day, the "bad" ones tend to be most active during a typical workday (from eight to nine in the morning until six in the evening). Apparently, the attackers are trying in this way to better hide their traffic in the general flow, the level of which is high at this time. "Some bots, such as search engine robots, are quite reliable, but research has shown that more than 60% of bots are capable of developing malicious activity on the Internet," said Nitzan Miron, Barracuda's vice president of product management and application security. - If such programs are left unchecked, they will steal information, disrupt the work of sites and can even provoke a leak. For this reason, identifying and effectively blocking bot traffic is essential."
