Last year, it was estimated that almost half of all internet traffic (49%) had come from bots – and with that, it seems malicious ones had also increased their share to roughly 32% of this figure.
73% of businesses had experienced some form of cyber attack during the last year. Of those experiencing such attacks, 13% said that the cost to them was more than $500,000.
Despite the increase in attacks and greater financial losses, it seems that many small to medium businesses aren’t placing high enough priority on finding ways to stop bots from attacking their services.
This highlights a pressing need for businesses to put in place stronger cybersecurity measures, to ensure their assets are safe and customer data is protected. Is protection against bots a high enough priority for businesses? Let’s take a look.
What Are The Financial and Operational Costs of Bots?
Bad bots and their automated traffic put businesses under strain, and cause billions of dollars of financial loss each year. They tend to target the most critical online infrastructure such as websites, APIs, and apps. This ultimately leads to disruptions in service, data theft, and sometimes even business closures.
Business owners now have to place more emphasis on recognizing the scale of these costs and make use of cybersecurity measures such as Re Captcha v3 to capture bots. Many people running companies still want to know How do CAPTCHAs work? and whether or not they can deliver the level of protection they need for their systems. The simple answer is, that alone they’ll be effective – but when paired with other security measures, they’ll provide an even stronger level of resistance against malicious bots.
Bot Detection Challenges For Businesses
Bots are now becoming increasingly sophisticated in their methods of mimicking humans online – and thus their ability to evade detection and initiate more cyber attacks. Businesses now face bots being able to get into their systems and carry out data scraping, account takeovers, and even coordinate large-scale botnet attacks without immediate detection, and as they increase in sophistication, they also become harder to stop.
Thus, business tech leaders must make sure they start to prioritize developing and implementing better analytical tools that detect patterns of attack, which can understand and flag subtle anomalies in web and app traffic that could predict and indicate sophisticated bot activities.
Not only that, but they’ve got to maintain better and more robust defenses to protect against increasingly intelligent cyber threats, which means their operations are more resilient and customers feel they can trust them with their data.
Which Business Sectors Are Affected Most?
It seems retail is one of the worst affected business industries, with just under 25% of online traffic coming from bad bots. Here, they’ll engage in price scraping and inventory hoarding, and they’ll also create buying pressures during time-limited sales or launches of new ranges.
Within the travel sector, almost 21% of online traffic is bad bots – and this can impact booking systems, and promo offers, and mean companies lose revenue.
Finally, financial services with about 16% of traffic resulting from bot attacks. However, it’s this sector that suffers from some of the most impactful activities – such as customer and business account takeover attacks that steal financial information and money. These need a higher level of vigilance not just from businesses, but also from customers themselves.
How Bots Have Advanced
Unsurprisingly AI has led the charge in the number of bots – tech like this means it’s easier to create bots that can perform simpler tasks such as scraping and automatic script creation – even for cybercriminals with little to no expertise.
AI is an undoubted game changer – and positively so in some instances for business. However, it can also create issues with malicious actors like bots to quickly generate and create large-scale attacks that can be difficult to counteract as they can quickly scrape data together and also bypass the usual detection routes.
Businesses have therefore got to make sure they take more care to invest in better, more adaptive security solutions to tackle these challenges and protect against the increasingly sophisticated strategies that bad bots use.
Mitigation Strategies To Assist Businesses
Bots will soon easily surpass the proportion of internet traffic created by humans – and not only that, the amount of malicious bots will continue to increase. This will lead to a huge shift in the digital ecosystem – with this, there needs to be greater awareness of how they can affect businesses and more investment in better cybersecurity strategies to target this and new bot-related threats.
AI tools mean that bots are becoming omnipresent and this creates further headaches for businesses who are already struggling to keep up with the challenges these malicious attacks cause.
Better strategic investment is key, as is developing a better bot management strategy – which should include AI drive security solutions. These are critical for businesses, so that they can defend themselves against the increasingly complex landscape of cybersecurity threats.
