The Year Bad Bots Went Mainstream

Distil Networks, the San Francisco-headquartered cybersecurity company focused on bot detection and mitigation, published its 2018 Bad Bot Report, titled “The Year Bad Bots Went Mainstream”.

The report, created by Distil’s Threat Research Lab, looks at the impact of automated threats across 2017 with the data including hundreds of billions of bad bot requests at the application layer over thousands of website domains.

Here are some key findings:

• Bad bots made up 21.8% of total website traffic in 2017, which represents a 9.5% growth from the previous year.
• Data centers became an even more significant breeding ground for bad bot traffic, which rose to 82.7% in 2017 – a 37% increase over 2016, largely as a result of the availability and low cost of cloud computing accounts.
• 74% of bad bot traffic is comprised of moderate or sophisticated bots, which avoid detection by mimicking browser technology (e.g. through the execution of JavaScript) or producing mouse movements that impersonate human behavior.

Bots are targeting businesses with an online presence daily for various reasons: account takeover, denial of service or price scraping. Large and medium-sized sites are hit the hardest by bad bots.

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