Intelligent CIO North America Issue 17 | Page 24

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These bots attempt attacks such as web and price scraping , inventory hoarding , account takeover attacks , Distributed Denial of Service ( DDoS ) attacks and much more . Bad bots make up a significant part of website traffic today and detecting and blocking them is of critical importance to businesses .
The 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 most 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 .
An in-depth look at bot traffic
Barracuda researchers analyzed traffic patterns over the first six months of 2021 . Here are some of the key takeaways from their analysis :
• Bots make up nearly two-thirds of Internet traffic , with bad bots making up nearly 40 % of all traffic . These bad bots include both basic web scrapers and attack scripts , as well as advanced persistent bots . These advanced bots try their best to evade standard defenses and attempt to perform their malicious activities under the radar . In this Baracuda dataset , the most common of these persistent bots were ones that went after e-commerce applications and login portals .
• E-commerce applications and login portals are the most common targets of advanced persistent bots .
• North America accounts for 67 % of bad bot trafficand 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 % 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 and with good reason . The attackers running these bad bots prefer to hide within the normal human traffic stream to avoid raising alarm bells . The common stereotype of a ‘ hacker ’ performing their attacks late into the night in a dark room with green fonts on a black screen has been replaced by people who set up their bots to carry out the automated attacks while they go about their day .
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