In A Battle For Web Traffic, Bad Bots Are Going After Grandma
As the Web turns 25, it's becoming a terrific place if you're a bot.
It began as a tool for human communication, but now, over 61.5 percent of the traffic on the Web is bots talking to these automated applications called bots, according to one study. And experts say about half of those bots are bad.
But first let's talk about the good bots.
For example, Google's bots crawl around the Web to find the best information. There are also bots that help make the Web run smoothly, says Marc Gaffan, co-founder of Incapsula, a website security firm. These bots "check that our websites are up and running all the time and measure how fast they are," he says.
Incapsula released a report that found the percentage of non-human Web traffic went from around 50 percent in 2012 to over 61 percent of all traffic last year.
Gaffan says a little over half of those bots are bad. The bad ones are "scanning your website looking for vulnerabilities, they're potentially trying to hack into your website," he says.
Once inside your system, bad bots can get a lot of information, like corporate and government secrets. But, Dan Kaminsky, the founder of the security firm White Ops, says his company noticed that bots were going after individual users.
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