The majority of website traffic is not from humans but from software robots, an online services company estimates. From programs that monitor Web updates toprograms that steal data, bots now seem to dominate cyberspace. Research by Incapsula, a cloud services company, estimates that bots now account for 61.5% of all website traffic, a 21% increase from 2012.
The study covers the entire world and was based on 1.45 billion bot visits to websites over a three-month period. The data came from 20,000 Incapsula client websites, meaning the results may not be representative of the entire Internet. However, the study’s findings are indicative of Internet trends. While many of the bots are malicious, the majority of the increase since 2012 is “attributed to increased website visits by good bots,” the company says. “Good” bots include those used by search engines to crawl websites and update their indexes, or those developed by companies that collect statistics for website administrators.
The relative percentage of malicious bots is estimated to remain stable at 31 percent, but there has been a decrease in the activity of bots that relay spam (unsolicited advertisements), which fell from 2% of all internet traffic in 2012 to 0.5% this year.
Source: freegr.blogspot.gr
