The Imperva Bad Bot Report was first published in 2013, but in 2022, bad bot traffic—malicious automated software programs capable of high-speed abuse, misuse, and attacks—rose to its highest level yet, reaching 30.2%.
Businesses might lose billions of dollars each year due to account compromise, data theft, spam, greater infrastructure and support expenses, user turnover, and poor online services.
Bad Bots
The yearly Imperva report has given security and business leaders realistic and helpful information on the development of automated traffic and bad bot technology. A phishing fraud used the EarthLink Spammer, one of the first botnets ever found, to send over a million emails.
One of the earliest instances of bots taking advantage of mobile browser settings more quickly scraping data was observed in 2014 by Imperva. The sophistication of malicious bots increased by 11% in 2015. Bad bots in 2016 quickly changed as the number of mobile devices increased.
- The Imperva Bad Bot Report was first published in 2013.
- One of the earliest instances of bots taking advantage of mobile browser settings more quickly scraping data was observed by Imperva.
- In 2022, Mobile Safari was the preferred browser of one in five malicious bots, an increase from 16.1% in 2021.
Bad bots swept the internet in 2020 and 2021 as automation advanced to a new level. 51.2% of all bad bot traffic in 2022 came from “advanced” bad bots, according to classification. Businesses should be concerned about this development because sophisticated bad bots closely imitate human behavior to avoid detection and use the most recent evasion strategies.
35% of account takeover attacks were targeted specifically at APIs, 58.7% of bad bot traffic was found on gaming websites and 47.7% was found on telecommunications websites, and 15% of all login attempts were considered to be account takeover attempts in the previous 12 months.
Additionally, 17% of all attacks on APIs came from bad bots that abused business logic, and Healthcare and Law & Government experienced a significant increase in the number of bad bot attacks.
In 2022, Mobile Safari was the preferred browser of one in five malicious bots, an increase from 16.1% in 2021. Businesses must take immediate action and make investments in online prevention and bot management to recognize and block sophisticated automation that targets APIs and application business logic.
