E-commerce businesses in Asia Pacific face serious threats from bots

Akamai Technologies has released a new State of the Internet (SOTI) report highlighting the serious security and business threats posed by web scraping bots.

The report, titled “Scraping Away Your Bottom Line: How Web Scrapers Impact eCommerce,” reveals that bots account for 42% of all web traffic, and a disturbing 65% of them were deemed malicious.

The e-commerce sector, especially in the Asia Pacific region, faces significant challenges from high-risk bot traffic because it is dependent on revenue-generating web applications.

While some bots benefit businesses through activities such as market research, malicious web scrapers are increasingly being used for competitive intelligence, espionage, stockpiling, and creating fake websites. These activities can harm profitability and negatively impact customer experiences.

“Every business with an online store relies on bots to some extent to scrape data from the web,” said Reuben Koh, director of technology and security strategy for APJ at Akamai Technologies.

“The challenge comes when these bots are misused, as their similar functionality makes it difficult to distinguish the beneficial from the malicious. This is then compounded by the rapidly evolving scraper landscape, which renders traditional defenses like firewalls ineffective,” he said.

Koh stressed the need for eCommerce companies to invest in adaptive solutions. “Now more than ever, eCommerce companies, especially in the APJ region, which is a key global trading hub, need to invest in fit-for-purpose solutions that can adapt and keep up with unpredictable and iterative malicious bot attacks – especially if they want to regionalize and expand their customer base, opening them up to new threats,” he said.

Key findings from the State of the Internet report include:

• AI botnets have the ability to discover and scrape unstructured data and content that is in a less consistent format or location. They can also use business intelligence to improve decision-making by collecting and processing data.
• Data harvesting bots can generate sophisticated phishing campaigns by using product images, descriptions, and pricing information to create fake storefronts or phishing pages designed to steal credentials or credit card information.
• Bots can facilitate abuse of new account creation, contributing to 50% of fraud losses.
• The technical impacts of data scraping on e-commerce sites include reduced site performance, contamination of site metrics, compromised credential attacks, increased computational costs, and more.

The Scraping Away Your Bottom Line report offers mitigation strategies for scraper bot attacks and includes a case study showing how websites perform more efficiently after implementing anti-scraper bot protections. The research also addresses compliance issues in light of the rise of bot attacks.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Akamai’s State of the Internet (SOTI) reports. The SOTI series offers expert insights into the cybersecurity and network performance landscapes, based on data collected from Akamai Connected Cloud.