New research has warned that activities involving malicious bots increased in 2021.

According to the Imperva Bad Bot Report, malicious bots made up 27.7% of all web traffic in 2021. This represents a record high, beating 2020’s figure of 25.6%.

While most bots are benign, performing automated tasks like answering emails or doing indexing work for search engines, they can be used to perform potentially dangerous tasks.

Bad bot activity outpaced good bots in 2021, which only accounted for 14.6% of internet traffic, down 0.6 percentage points.

These include account takeover (ATO) activities, where a bot will use stolen credentials to attempt to login to a victim’s accounts, potentially leading to stolen data and financial fraud. According to the report, ATO attacks for 2021 were up 148% compared to 2020.

Denial of service attacks are another popular use for malicious bots, slowing or taking down websites altogether thanks to the power of massed bots increasing traffic.

In addition, the report warned malicious bots were involved in content or price scraping and scalping.

The worst affected industries include sports, gaming and gambling, and food and drink, all of which saw double digit increases in the amount of traffic they were hit by. Financial services were the most targeted for ATO attacks, which suffered 34.6% of all attacks.

The UK came in third for the worst affected country by malicious bots on 6.7%, behind the US on 43.1% and Australia on 6.8%.

Furthermore, the report warned that evasive malicious bots are on the rise. Designed to evade detection and common defences, these accounted for the majority of bad bot traffic, 65.6% in 2021.

Imperva VP of Application Security Ryan Windham said: “Businesses cannot overlook the impact of malicious bot activity as it is contributing to more account compromise, higher infrastructure and support costs, customer churn, and degraded online services.

“With automated fraud growing in intensity and complexity, advanced bot protection is essential for preventing the growing threat digital businesses and consumers face from bad bots.”

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The pandemic years have been marked by an escalation of malicious cyberactivity. Ransomware attacks on the UK rose by 151% in the first half of 2021. And the malware was delivered by a surge of spam emails, with over 45% of all emails sent last year believed to be spam.

The escalation led to ransomware being dubbed the most significant threat facing the UK by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

However, there have been signs that cybercrime may be on the decline after enjoying two bumper years. A recent report noted that many of the high-profile cyber-attacks from 2021 had turned the tide against hacker groups, causing cracks to appear in the ransomware ecosystem.

This comes alongside research that said that ransomware leaks were down 25.3% in the first quarter of this year compared to the previous quarter.

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