A new State of the Internet (SOTI) report by Akamai Technologies, Inc. finds that bots compose 42% of overall web traffic, and 65% of these bots are malicious.
"Every business with an online storefront relies on web scraper bots to some extent. The challenge arises when these bots are misused, as their similar functions make it difficult to distinguish between beneficial and malicious ones. It is then compounded by the rapidly evolving scraper landscape, which renders traditional defenses like firewalls ineffective," said Reuben Koh, director of Security Technology & Strategy, APJ, Akamai Technologies.
High-risk bot traffic
Web scraper bots negatively impact customer experience, as malicious players can use them for competitive intelligence and espionage, inventory hoarding, imposter site creation, and other schemes. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) botnets makes scraper bots hard to detect.
The report highlighted AI botnets' ability to discover and scrape unstructured data and content in a less consistent format or location. They can also leverage business intelligence to enhance the decision-making process by collecting, extracting, and then processing data.
Malicious players can also use scraper bots to generate phishing campaigns and facilitate the abuse of new account openings.
Scraped organisations can suffer degradation of website performance, site metric pollution, compromised credentials attacks from phishing sites, increased compute costs, and more.
