Barracuda, a provider of cloud-enabled security solutions, released key findings about bad bots and the ways these automated attacks are evolving.
The report, titled “Bot attacks: Top Threats and Trends – Insights into the growing number of automated attacks,” explores emerging traffic patterns, live examples of bot behavior and detection, and the steps IT teams should take to protect their businesses.
The full report is available here: www.barracuda.com/bot-threat-report
Barracuda’s report looks at current trends, such as the volume of traffic from these bad bots, where bot attacks are originating from, and the time-of-day attacks are likely to happen. It also breaks down live examples and covers the steps IT teams can take and technology they should be using to stop these types of attacks.
Barracuda researchers analyzed traffic patterns over the first six months of 2021. Here are some of the takeaways from their analysis:
- Bots make up nearly two-thirds of internet traffic, with bad bots making up nearly 40 percent of all traffic.
- E-commerce applications and login portals are the most common targets of advanced persistent bots.
- North America accounts for 67 percent of bad bot traffic—and most of it originates from public data centers.
- Most bot traffic comes in from the two large public clouds—AWS and Microsoft Azure—in roughly equal measure.
- Just over 22 percent of bad bot traffic comes from Europe, with European bad bot traffic more likely to come from hosting services or residential IPs.
- Bad bots follow a standard workday.
“While some bots like search engine crawlers are good, our research shows that over 60 percent of bots are dedicated to carrying out malicious activities at scale,” said Nitzan Miron, VP of Product Management, Application Security at Barracuda. “When left unchecked, these bad bots can steal data, affect site performance, and even lead to a breach. That’s why it’s critically important to detect and effectively block bot traffic.”
