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Bots are now Half of all Internet traffic

Comixbooks

Comixbooks

Fully [H]
Joined
Jun 7, 2008
Messages
23,798

Hi, robot: Half of all internet traffic now automated​

If you sometimes feel that the internet isn’t the same vibrant place it used to be, you’re not alone. New research suggests that most of the traffic traversing the network isn’t human at all.
Bots (software programs that interact with web sites) have been ubiquitous for years. But in its 2025 Bad Bot Report, application security company Imperva claimed this is the first time traffic from bots became more prevalent than human traffic.
The rise in bots is down to generative artificial intelligence (AI), Imperva said. This is the same technology that now flirts with people online for you and automatically writes heartfelt consolatory emails on behalf of heartless administrators. This tech has made it easier to create bots that do your bidding online. While some of those bots are benign, not all have your best interests at heart.

The rise of bad bots​

Traffic from “bad bots”—those created with malicious intent—first surpassed good bot traffic in 2016, Imperva’s research said, and it’s been getting worse. Bad bots comprised 37% of internet traffic in 2024, up from 32% the year prior. Good bots accounted for just 14% of the internet’s traffic.
Bad bots do all kinds of unpleasant things. An increasing number try to hijack peoples’ online accounts, which they often do by “credential stuffing.” This is where a bot takes a password and email address that has been stolen and leaked online, and then tries those credentials across a myriad of services in the hope that its owner will have reused the password elsewhere.
These account takeover attacks have skyrocketed lately. December 2024 saw around 330,000 such incidents, up from around 190,000 in December 2023. That could be down to a flood of data breaches that flooded the market with more stolen credentials to try, Imperva said.
Other attacks include scraping data from websites, which is a problem for businesses that don’t want their intellectual property stolen, and also for the individuals who own that data.
Cyber criminals use bots to commit payment fraud by exploiting vulnerabilities in checkout systems. There’s also a thriving business in scalping bots that buy everything from event tickets to new sneakers for high-value resale, denying legitimate customers the opportunity to buy these items for themselves.
The report also found bots targeting specific sectors. The travel industry accounted for 27% of bad bot traffic (the highest by industry) in 2024, up from 21% in 2023. These bots pull tricks such as pretending to book airline seats online and abandoning the purchase at the last minute, which skews seat pricing.
Retail was the second hardest-hit industry in 2024, accounting for 15% of bot traffic, followed by education at 11%.



https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/u...v3_1_174492353621&utm_content=robot_automated
 
I have seen some comments I believed to be written by chat GPT on this forum. The tin foil fat piece of me thinks that the push for AI and botting is designed to create more noise than signal and prevent consensus amongst non elites. The internet has been a revolutionary information gathering and sharing technology that disrupts traditional information control systems; no way the elites can allow this to continue totally unchecked.
 
Depends on how they define traffic, in some sense it would be only half ? hard to believe that it is only half.

In others sense, if they count in gigabyte going throught wire (the amount of internet traffic that is Netflix-prime-hbo-disney-etc..., traditional tv, "real" youtube watched by real people, tiktok, all the porn watched by real people, must be magnitude more than metadata/text crawler bots.

Cannot see repots, but looking at some figure:
In 2024, 48% of all web traffic to travel sites was made up of bad bots,

That probably how they define traffic here, website interface users, not actual data flow.

Darunion said:
wtf is "good bot traffic"? I put them all in the same bad pile but whatever.
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Search engine crawler type of stuff, website own test suite running, non-gaming legit travel agency booking. Bot is anything automated.
 
Darunion said:
wtf is "good bot traffic"? I put them all in the same bad pile but whatever.
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What Luke said, good bot traffic is googlebot, bing, yandex, baidu, a couple more. They crawl at reasonable rates, sort of respect boundaries, and most importantly, eventually send real users to your site.

LukeTbk said:
Cannot see repots, but looking at some figure:
In 2024, 48% of all web traffic to travel sites was made up of bad bots,
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If this is talking about travel sites... I used to work at yahoo travel decades ago. Probably most of the situation is the same. You've got three kinds of travel sites. Booking sites, like airlines and hotel chains and the big online travel agencies. Guides sites, like trip advisor. And one off things like a tourist attraction. Big sites are kind of a mix, your airline probably has a guides section that nobody noticed, your travel guides site probably does (cobranded) booking somewhere. One off sites don't care about bot traffic. Travel guides want search engine crawlers because it gets users in the door; they probably don't mind other bots as long as it's not "content stealing" bots. Booking sites do not want bots past their front pages; if the bots trigger inventory searches, that's no bueno; inventory search is very expensive and they may pay their technology providers on a per search basis; they get really mad when the "look to book" ratio changes. Comparison travel search products are frowned on in the industry because of the number of searches they drive. I haven't followed the industry much, but right after these products gained popularity, most of the price differences by booking venue disappeared for flights. My (dated) insider advise is to search wherever and book flights with the carrier directly; the only exception is if you can get a flight+hotel deal somewhere else that's enough lower cost than booking separately; but check flight+hotel from your airline.
 
scojer said:
Thread 'The Dead Internet > AI > Transhumanism' https://hardforum.com/threads/the-dead-internet-ai-transhumanism.2014467/

Welcome to the dead Internet.
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You may be semi joking, but honestly, in the future (maybe even "the now") what is the goddamn point of the Internet if you can never be sure if whoever is on the other side is a real person, or just an AI language model trying to influence you into buying some stupid shit.

I still say we burn everything, go back to ~2006 and start all over from there. Everything in tech / on the internet started going downhill in ~2007.

Twisted Kidney said:
An internet of infinite, self-replicating slop.

That's where we're headed.
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Unfortunately I fear you are right.
 
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This is not surprising at all. Being through this internet age, I always wondered what has happened to good conversation or debate. It almost feels like everything is politics 24/7 lmao. I have deleted X, facebook. Even threads is all fricking bots it seems now. Instagram is probably next on my list lmao.
 
I feel that extends to this forum as well. Turns out, people don't watch mainstream news. People have turned to social media for news, because mainstream news is... not really news. More like propaganda news. So you have a mixture of bots and dudes from India pretending to be some normal dude. Shits out of control.
 
GoldenTiger said:
Yeah, that's why I once accused polonyc2 of being a bot, like Comixbooks mentioned. He posts the same things on multiple forums but he is actually a human :eek:.
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I do post on multiple forums (as I'm sure many people do)...and I will continue to do it...absolutely nothing wrong with that...you're posting it as an insult or put down but I have no issues posting in multiple places...I do that for one main reason- more exposure to get my question answered...if I post in multiple places the chances of someone knowledgeable knowing the answer is higher...just posting on [H] is fine for something not important like a game trailer but if I want to know an answer to something technical about my hardware no doubt I will post in multiple places, especially since certain forums are better for certain things

just waiting or hoping for one person on one forum to answer is silly...especially if it's something important or critical
 
polonyc2 said:
I do post on multiple forums (as I'm sure many people do)...and I will continue to do it...absolutely nothing wrong with that...you're posting it as an insult or put down but I have no issues posting in multiple places...I do that for one main reason- more exposure to get my question answered...if I post in multiple places the chances of someone knowledgeable knowing the answer is higher...just posting on [H] is fine for something not important like a game trailer but if I want to know an answer to something technical about my hardware no doubt I will post in multiple places, especially since certain forums are better for certain things

just waiting or hoping for one person on one forum to answer is silly...especially if it's something important or critical
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I just was saying copy-pasting between forums is bot like, that's all. I agree posting on multiple forums can get a faster response, but I never copy and paste my posts verbatim. I tailor it to the forum/community/thread I'm posting in. That's why I once thought you were a bot :).
 
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