It may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but sadly has nothing to do with Arnold Schwarzenegger. The fact is the human race is no longer the dominant species in our world, or at least our online world. A report published last year by Incapsula found that just 38.5% of all internet traffic was generated by human interaction (such as web browsing, uploading/downloading content, checking emails etc.); the remaining 61.5% of traffic being generated by so called ‘bots’.
“But what is a bot?”, I hear you cry! A bot (short for robot) is simply a software application which runs automatic tasks over the internet. Such tasks can include anything from search engines indexing websites (the most famous being ‘googlebot’ – probably don’t need to explain what that’s doing!), right through the spectrum to mailicious scripts trying to gain access to sites and servces by pure brute force (trying common combinations of username and password – we see huge numbers of these attempts on our servers daily and is the reason why you should avoid simple and common username / password combinations, but that’s an article in itself).
I’ve included the accompanying infographic below, but it’s well worth reading the full post, as this gives some more in depth information including how the stats where gathered – impressive in itself in scale alone.
