According to the 2015 Bad Bot Landscape report, published by Distil Networks, only 40% of Internet traffic is generated by humans! Good bots (e.g. Googlebot and Bingbot for search engines) account for 36% or traffic, while bad bots account for 23%.

Bad bots continue to place a huge tax on IT security and web infrastructure teams across the globe. The variety, volume and sophistication of today’s bots wreak havoc across online operations big and small. They’re the key culprits behind web scraping, brute force attacks, competitive data mining, brownouts, account hijacking, unauthorized vulnerability scans, spam, man-inthe- middle attacks, and click fraud.

These are just averages. It’s much worse for some big players.

Bad bots made up 78% of Amazon’s 2014 traffic, not a huge difference from 2013. VerizonBusiness really cleaned up its act, cutting its bad bot traffic by 54% in 2014.

It was surprising to me that the US is the largest source for bad bot traffic.

The United States, with thousands of cheap hosts, dominates the rankings in bad bot origination. Taken in isolation, absolute bad bot volume data can be somewhat misleading. Measuring bad bots per online user yields acountry’s “Bad Bot GDP.”

Using this latter “bad bots per online user” statistic, the nations of Singapore, Israel, Slovenia and Maldives are the biggest culprits.

The report contains more great information for those who are interested in bots. Enjoy!