We know that the internet is full of bots, but their intentions are noth the best interest of our heart. In fact, the bad bots attack 96% of websites which have a login page and are highly active within the user accounts. This puts companies at risk of account takeover, data theft, and even fraud.
According to a new report from the Distil Networks, a company which handles bot detection and mitigation, almost all the websites which have a login page are under the attack of bad bots. These bots which are programmed and put to use by cyber criminals and hackers can be quite efficient in their endeavours.
The report finds that the websites requiring a login are almost certain to be attacked by a bad bots. With a 96% attack rate, it is probably easy to name such a site at the top of your mind and get it right. All these bad bots are used by hackers, competitors, and fraudsters, and they are most often than not to blame for web scraping, competitive data mining, brute force attacks, account hijacking, data theft, online fraud, digital ad fraud, spam, and site downtime.
“Massive credential dumps like the Yahoo and Ashley Madison, coupled with this increasing sophistication of bad bots, has created a world where the bad bots are running rampant on websites with accounts,” said Rami Essaid, the CEO and co-founder of Distil Networks. “All the Website defenders should be worried because once these bad bots are behind the login page, they will have access to even more sensitive data for scraping and greater opportunity to successfully carry out transaction fraud.”
The Internet is full of bots, both good and bad. In fact, their presence is so vast that 40% of all web traffic in 2016 came from bots. Bad bots alone were responsible for half that amount.
