Every second click a bot: human activity on the internet almost in the minority

The "Bad Bot Report" by Imperva, a subsidiary of the French conglomerate Thales, shows a continuing negative trend for 2023. Not only will humans soon be in the minority online. Malicious, automated programs, to which the report explicitly refers, are spreading particularly rapidly.

However, such software can be quite useful. These "Good Bots" are primarily used by search engines of all kinds and researchers.

This article is also likely to be initially discovered by a Google bot. After analyzing the keywords and content, it then appears in the news feeds in which it arouses interest.

Comparison sites automatically scan for the daily updated prices. Publicly accessible weather or traffic data is also automatically checked and evaluated by other services.

However, they have long been a minority, although good and bad bots were still roughly in balance until 2017. Today, two out of three bots are of the harmful variety.

If they didn't exist, three quarters of all online activity would be triggered by humans. However, a third of all data exchanged on the internet worldwide is attributable to various types of malicious programs. Their share has risen by almost 60 percent since 2018.

Bad bots not only ensure that the number of hits and likes on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram are taken with a grain of salt. The use of artificial intelligence is particularly problematic because bots are becoming increasingly cunning and can hardly be distinguished from human users.

According to the report, over 40 percent of bots in the social media sector are of the malicious variety. They either deliberately spread false claims and thus multiply them. Or they leave masses of comments under predefined posts but cannot be recognized as bots by website operators.

In the case of online games, almost 60 percent of them help with cheating, open false user accounts or try to take over real user accounts.

Then there are the classic "bot armies", which overload websites with mass requests or search the internet for known vulnerabilities in computer systems in order to take them over.

In addition to all the trouble, there are also enormous costs involved. On the one hand, there is the damage caused by the failure of websites and online services. Then there are penalties if companies fail to protect personal data adequately, for example.

And then there is the gigantic volume of data. After all, one third of servers, internet nodes and data lines are used for malicious activities. This drives up power consumption and hardware costs.

Not to mention the damage to your own nerves caused by stupid comments in your favorite forum, the same old SPAM messages over and over again and cheating and artificial opponents on the WoW server.