The Big Bot Invasion

Bots might be taking over the world sooner than you think. According to Incapsula's latest infographic and report, there's more bot traffic on websites than human traffic. Compared to its last report, the cloud-based service noticed a 21 percent growth in total bot traffic.
Around 38.5 percent of Internet traffic is human while the remaining 61.5 percent is made up of bot traffic, ranging from safe to malicious ones. Incapsula offers two possible reasons for the recent boost in bot traffic: one, new online services introduce new bot types to the web, and two, some of the good bots that are programmed to visit the same websites periodically have shorter patterns. This means that they go to these websites more often than they used to, contributing to increased traffic.
Good Bot, Bad BotLet's hear the good news first. The report points out that while the percentage of malicious bots is roughly the same, Spam Bot activity has decreased to half a percent this year from two percent in 2012. We can thank Google's anti-spam campaign for this; with the latest Penguin 2.0 and 2.1 updates, the company caused a 75 percent decrease in automated link-spamming activity.
Now for the bad news. While spam activity is down, the group of unclassified bots with a range of hostile intentions has risen by eight percent. All of these bad bots try to assume a person's identity to navigate their way through a website's security measures. They can be broken down into four different types of malicious bots.
Who They Are and What They WantYou first have your scrappers who target anyone and are mostly concentrated on travel industry websites, classifieds, news sites, e-stores, and forums. Scrappers duplicate content, steal email addresses for spam, and reverse engineer price and business models.
We're all familiar with the spammer category. Spammers lurk on blogs, forums, and other websites that allow posting. They post annoying, irrelevant content or malware links that can harm websites' other visitors. These nasty bots can also turn a site into a "link farm" that causes search engines to blacklist it.
Hacking Tools prowl mostly on CMS-based websites like Joomla or Vbulletin. They commit data theft, inject and distribute malware on the site, hijack servers, and deface or delete website content.
Finally, impersonators can be found anywhere and target anyone. These sneaky, automated spy bots are in a higher tier than the others. They can commit layer seven DDoS attacks, which result in service degradation and website downtime.
Remember that even though hackers might be getting smarter, you can still fight them off. Be careful about what websites you access and what you post or share on them. There's a whole range of antivirus software available that helps fight existing and future malware attacks. One of our favorites is Editors' Choice BitDefender Antivirus Plus (2014). The more protection you have, the better off you'll be against a bot attack.
Click on the image below to view the full infographic.