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E-commerce Sector Hardest Hit by High-Risk Bot Traffic: Akamai Report

Posted on by darion

Cybersecurity firm Akamai Technologies Inc. has released a State of the Internet report that examines the security and business threats organizations face from the proliferation of web crawling bots. The report shows that bots account for 42% of total network traffic and 65% of them are malicious.

Due to its dependence on web applications to generate revenue, the e-commerce sector has been most affected by high-risk bot traffic. While some bots are beneficial to business, web scraper bots are used for competitive intelligence and espionage, stockpiling, creating scam sites, and other schemes that negatively impact both the bottom line and the customer experience.

There are no regulations prohibiting the use of scraping bots and they are difficult to detect due to the development of artificial intelligence botnets.

The main findings of the report include:

  • AI botnets can detect and search unstructured data and content that has a less consistent format or location. Additionally, they can use real-world business intelligence to improve decision-making by collecting, extracting, and processing data.

  • Scraper bots can be used to generate more sophisticated phishing campaigns by capturing product images, descriptions, and pricing information to create fake storefronts or phishing sites designed to steal credentials or credit card information.

  • Bots can be used to facilitate account creation abuse, which accounts for as much as 50% of fraud losses, according to recent research.

  • The technical impacts that organizations face as a result of scraping include: degraded website performance, contamination of website metrics, credential attacks via phishing sites, and increased computing costs.

“Bots continue to pose a huge challenge, causing a variety of issues for app and API owners. This includes scraping, which can steal web data and create impersonated websites,” said Patrick Sullivan, CTO, Security Strategy, Akamai.

“The scraper market is also changing due to advances like headless browser technology, which require organizations to take an approach to managing this type of bot activity that is more sophisticated than other JavaScript-based countermeasures,” Sullivan said.