Robot program accounts for 60% of total traffic

A study conducted by Incapsula, an Internet security firm, found that the amount of traffic generated by robotic programs accounted for 61.5% of the total Internet traffic, up 21% from 51% a year earlier.

According to research, a large part of the robot program is malicious software, they are mainly used to steal data, or paste ads in the comments area to cheat money.

However, Incapsula said, the large increase in flow of robotic programs is mainly due to the activities of "benign" robot programs, they are mainly used by search engines to crawl Web information to retrieve their content, or by the data analysis companies to provide feedback on the performance of the site evaluation, Or it is used by other agencies to accomplish special tasks, such as helping the Internet repository to save information that might be deleted.

To complete the study, Incapsula said it had observed 1.45 billion robotic programs during a 90-day period. The source of this information is provided by 20,000 websites operated by Incapsula customers.

Dr. Ian Brown, deputy director of the Oxford University Network Security Center, who did not take part in the study, Ian that although the data is not accurate enough, it will help to study the growth of Non-human network traffic.

Although robotic programs have grown in total, Incapsula says the proportion of these software being used for malicious action is getting lower.

Incapsula points out that the frequency of automatic pasting with junk links is down by 75%. That, in part, is due to Google's efforts, which have made it difficult for robotic programs to do this.

In addition, the frequency of hacking by robotic programs has dropped by 10%, and the specific actions involved include using code to spread malware, stealing credit cards and attacking websites.

However, the study points out that robotic programs have increased by 8% in other ways. This mainly refers to the trust that pretends to be a search engine and other legitimate agency software used to cheat security measures. Incapsula that these robotic programs are typically tailored to perform specific tasks, that they will conduct DDoS attacks or steal company secrets.

In addition, the frequency of the robotic program to carry out beneficial behavior increased by 55%. It may be that legitimate agencies are taking more frequent samples of the site.

Dr Brown believes that these additional visits could put pressure on site operators or that they would have to buy more servers to handle the extra traffic. However, he believes it is within reach. Dr Brown said: "While this trend will increase the cost of site operators, I think they can cope with this size range." ”