Bots are Increasingly Rampant in Cyberspace, This is The Danger
Morrissey Technology – The Akamai report states that 42% of internet traffic is generated by bots, and shockingly, 65% of those bots are used for crime. In this report, Akamai deliberately researched data scavenger bots circulating in cyberspace. This bot is designed to collect data and content for use by cybercrime.
The e-commerce sector is considered to be the most affected by the actions of data scavenger bots and high-risk traffic bots. It must be admitted, there are indeed bots that can be profitable, but these scavenger bots often have a negative impact, especially on consumers. This is because data scavenger bots are used to spy on rival stores, stockpile goods, create fraudulent sites, and various other criminal activities.
Akamai CTO Patrick Sullivan explained that bots are a significant problem, because they can create a number of targets for web applications, services and application programming interface (API) owners.
For example, data-scavenging bots can easily steal product images, descriptions, pricing information, and other data. Then this data can be used by cybercriminals to create fake sites to imitate ecommerce sites from well-known brands.
In fact, now with the presence of AI, the data taken by bots can be slightly modified to create a site that generates traffic — and is then used to make money through advertising revenue.
Bots with AI are also more difficult to detect. For example, AI botnets, which can function with unstructured data. According to Akamai, with the use of AI, criminals can collect, extract and process data more efficiently.
Lastly, bots can also be used to create fake accounts, which can then be used to target victims financially. Even the most innocuous scavenging bot can be used to degrade a site’s performance, impact search engine impact calculations, and also increase the computing and hosting costs of a site.