- In 2024, 51% of all Internet traffic came across bots, according to Thales
- Not all robots are malicious, but many are
- Travel and retail industries are particularly affected
Boots, automated programs that perform internet tasks, are now taking more than half of all Internet traffic, said new research.
The waterproof Bad BOT 2025 report revealed that it was the first time in a decade that 51% of all web traffic constituted BOT traffic, attributing the change in power to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and important languages of languages (LLM).
The waterproof ratio is concentrated, first and foremost, on the bad robots. It argues that the travel and retail sectors are faced with an “advanced bot problem”, where bad robots represent 41% and 59% of all traffic respectively. In 2024, the travel industry was the most attacked sector with 27% of all BOT attacks (compared to 21% the previous year).
Bad robots
With the proliferation of generative AI, things will only get worse, waterproof more. Bytespider Bot is apparently responsible for more than half (54%) for all AI compatible attacks. Other important contributors include Applebot (26%), Claudebot (13%) and Chatgpt User Bot (6%).
However, all bot trafficking is not malicious. There are many useful and often essential robots, such as research robots, surveillance robots, social media robots or data scratch robots. They are used to index websites for search engines, check websites for performance or stop times, plan publications or respond automatically, or to aggregate sites and scrape the precious data.
However, bad robots occupy a heavy part of all Bot traffic, presenting a real challenge for the cybersecurity community.
These tools, whose popularity exploded approximately three years ago with the introduction of Chat-Gpt, simplified the creation and the scaling of malicious bots, noted waterproof.
“As AI tools become more accessible, cybercriminals are increasingly exploiting these technologies to create and deploy malware which now represents 37% of all Internet traffic – a significant increase of 32% in 2023,” said the company.
“This is the sixth consecutive year of growth in bad bots, posing security challenges for organizations that strive to protect their digital assets.”
