The recent report from cybersecurity firm Barracuda showed that bots make up nearly two-thirds of internet traffic, with bad bots making up nearly 40 percent of all traffic. The use of bots in today's era of digital transformation is not a surprising fact. In fact, the demand for chatbots and voice bots is increasing on a wide scale. Bots are software programs designed to achieve certain automated, predefined tasks. Bad bots are programmed to execute malicious tasks that threaten the cybersecurity of users.

The report titled 'Bot attacks: Top Threats and Trends – Insights' which has recently been launched by Barracuda displays the increasing number of automated attacks and evaluating evolving traffic structures, living examples of bot behavior and detection, and also the steps IT teams should take to protect their businesses.

Barracuda researchers surveyed the internet traffic sample over the first six months of 2021. The report also focused on current trends, such as the volume of traffic rising from these bad bots, where bot attacks are emanating from, and the time when attacks are most likely to happen.

The report discovered that the most common targets of modern persistent bots are mainly e-commerce apps and login portals. A majority of the bot traffic was observed coming in from the two large public clouds, namely AWS and Microsoft Azure, in approximately equal measure. The primary area in terms of bot traffic, North America accounted for 67 percent of bad bot traffic. A majority of such traffic emerged from public data centers.

Over 22 percent of bad bot traffic was looming in from Europe, with European bad bot traffic more likely to come from hosting services or residential IPs (Internet Protocols). The research also showed that over 60% of bots are committed to carrying out hostile activities on a large scale. If these remain unchecked, the bad bots can take data, attack site performance, and even can lead to data breaches. Owing to this it is important to identify and potently block bot traffic.