In 2022, nearly half of the Internet traffic comes from robots, and network security is facing severe challenges.

CTOnews.com, May 11 / PRNewswire-FirstCall-Asianet /-- the 2023 Imperva malicious Robot report found that nearly half (47.4%) of Internet traffic came from robots in 2022, an increase of 5.1% over last year. At the same time, the proportion of human traffic fell to 52.6 per cent, the lowest level in eight years.

Robot traffic essentially refers to any non-human traffic that visits websites or applications. Robot traffic is essential for digital assistants, search engines and so on. However, malicious robots can interact with Internet applications and are used to attack websites, mobile applications and API to perform activities such as web crawling, data mining, brute force cracking, DDoS, transaction fraud and so on.

According to Imperva, malicious robot traffic increased by 2.5% in 2022, accounting for 30.2% of all traffic. The report also points out that this is the fourth year in a row that malicious robot traffic has been growing.

In addition, CTOnews.com notes that malicious robots are becoming more and more complex, making them more difficult to detect. More than half (51.2%) of malicious robot traffic comes from so-called "advanced" robots, an increase of 25.9% over last year. Malicious robot activity occurs mostly in Germany, Ireland, Singapore and the United States, where industries such as tourism, retail and financial services continue to suffer from unusually high attacks.