- Bad bots, accounting for 24% of internet traffic in 2024, are evolving to mimic human behaviors. Nearly half are classified as advanced and highly targeted in their malicious activities.
- A new category, “grey bots,” primarily focused on aggressive data scraping, raises ethical and unauthorized behavior concerns.
- Effective protection against bots requires multilayered security approaches, including robust application security, anti-bot measures, machine learning, and access controls.
While decreasing in overall traffic share, malicious bots have become more sophisticated and harder to detect. Advanced bots now constitute 49% of bot activity and often use complex techniques to bypass traditional security measures. These bots can mimic human interactions, evade detection with slow and deliberate actions, and target e-commerce and login systems for fraud and account takeovers.
A newer category, “grey bots,” blurs the lines of legitimacy. These AI-driven bots aggressively scrape data, ignoring restrictions like robots.txt, primarily to train generative AI models. Although not inherently malicious, their unchecked activity raises ethical and operational concerns for organizations.
To combat these evolving threats, organizations must adopt layered security strategies. This includes robust application security with rate-limiting and monitoring, specialized anti-bot measures capable of detecting advanced attacks, and the integration of machine learning to identify nearly undetectable bot behavior. Basic security practices, such as multifactor authentication, remain critical to safeguarding access points from brute force and credential-stuffing attacks.
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