Quote:The financial services industry sees nearly half of all website traffic coming from malicious bots.
 
About a fifth of all web traffic (20.4 percent) comes from bad bots, which continue to attack daily in automated offensives on websites, mobile apps and APIs. That’s worse for some verticals, like the banking and finance sector, which was hit the hardest last year.
 
That’s according to the Distil Research Lab’s latest Bad Bot report, released Wednesday, which also found, in an analysis of hundreds of billions of 2018 bot requests, that 73.6 percent of bad bots can now be classified as “advanced persistent bots” (APBs).
 
While the levels of bad-bot traffic have actually slightly decreased year-over-year, the rise of greater sophistication should be of note, the report said.

Bad bots are endemically used by malicious competitors, hackers and fraudsters to carry out all forms of internet cyberattacks – including account takeovers, brute-force attacks and hijacking, web scraping, competitive data mining, transaction fraud, data theft, spam, digital ad fraud and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.