Barracuda research reveals skyrocketing levels of bot traffic

Barracuda released key findings about bad bots and the ways these automated attacks are evolving. The report, titled Bot attacks: Top Threats and Trends – Insights into the growing number of automated attacks explores emerging traffic patterns, live examples of bot behavior and detection, and the steps IT teams should take to protect their businesses.

The report looks at current trends, such as the volume of traffic from these bad bots, where bot attacks are originating from, and the time of day attacks are most likely to happen. It also breaks down live examples and covers the steps IT teams can take and technology they should be using to stop these types of attacks. 

An in-depth look at bot traffic

Barracuda researchers analyzed traffic patterns over the first six months of 2021. Here are some of the key takeaways from their analysis:

• Bots make up nearly two-thirds of internet traffic, with bad bots making up nearly 40% of all traffic.
• E-commerce applications and login portals are the most common targets of advanced persistent bots. 
• North America accounts for 67% of bad bot traffic—and most of it originates from public data centers.
• Most bot traffic comes in from the two large public clouds—AWS and Microsoft Azure—in roughly equal measure.
• Just over 22% of bad bot traffic comes from Europe, with European bad bot traffic more likely to come from hosting services or residential IPs.
• Bad bots follow a standard workday.

Tushar Richabadas,  Senior Product Marketing Manager, Applications and Cloud Security, Barracuda, said, “While some bots like search engine crawlers are good, our research shows that over 60% of bots are dedicated to carrying out malicious activities at scale. When left unchecked, these bad bots can steal data, affect site performance, and even lead to a breach. That’s why it’s critically important to detect and effectively block bot traffic.”