Bots are responsible for a variety of digital ills including Web scraping, brute force attacks, competitive data mining, brownouts, account hijacking, unauthorized vulnerability scans, spam, man-in-the-middle attacks and click fraud. The result, of course, is greater stress on IT security and Web infrastructure teams and it's costing millions as well.
"As we see through our customers, the bad bot problem continues to evolve. Perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of this report is the rise in mobile bots," said Distil Networks CEO and Co-founder Rami Essaid. "For the first time in history, mobile bad bot traffic makes up a significant portion of overall bad bot traffic, having increased tenfold over the past year. Right now mobile bots make up less than 10 percent of the total bots, creating a greenfield of opportunity for the bad bot landscape to more than double very quickly."
The Bad Bot Landscape Report from Distil Networks provides some other interesting data on the scope of the problem:
+ Small websites are at the greatest risk of brownouts, as bad bots made up 32 percent of Web traffic as they tend to have less robust Web infrastructure than larger sites.
+ Bad bots represent over 8 percent of mobile Web traffic.
+ 41 percent of bad bots attempted to enter a website's infrastructure disguised as legitimate human traffic.
+ 3 percent of bad bots were categorized as "highly sophisticated" in 2014, and immune to bot detection methods found in typical Web Application Firewalls.