The truth is, many companies don’t realize how advanced malicious automation has gotten, and they may not even know that they have a bot problem at all. If you’re serving up traffic to bots, you’re spending money on infrastructure, systems, tools, and personnel that you shouldn’t have to. This blog post looks at the blight of bot traffic and its consequences on an organization’s overall costs.
The Blight of Bot Traffic
With everyone working, shopping, and living online these days, traffic to your online channels is likely on the upswing. But if you dig into your traffic, you will see that not all of it is from legitimate users. Less than half of all Internet traffic is actual people — the rest is automated — and not just the good kind. Our research shows 50% of that automated traffic is malicious (in other words, 25% of all Internet traffic is comprised of bad bots) from bot operators leveraging automation at scale.
You’re likely aware of the havoc bad bots can wreak from credential abuse that leads to account takeover (ATO) to application denial of service (DoS) and denial of inventory, from carding and cracking to web scraping – whether it’s pricing scraping or content scraping – and the list goes on. That’s why many online companies deploy a bot management solution. However, the fundamental architecture of these legacy anti-bot solutions still allow bad bots into their infrastructure, and as a result, they aren’t effective at stopping malicious automation.
Unfortunately, the impact of letting bad bot traffic in has consequences not only for your security posture but also for your budget. You are essentially paying for all that non-human traffic to your online channels — an expense that will never yield leads, sales, or real customer engagement. Downtime due to denial of service (DoS) is also quite costly, ranging from $140,000 to $540,000 per hour according to Gartner. Adding to this cost is the fact that traditional solutions are expensive to install and maintain and typically require people or services to monitor them.
