The company has released its “Bad Bot Landscape Report”

Apr 24, 2014 19:11 GMT  ·  By

Distil Networks has released its “Bad Bot Landscape Report” for 2013. The company has a database of 7 billion bad bots, 2.2 billion of which it identified and catalogued last year.

Distil warns that bad bot traffic is on the rise. The number of bad bots in the overall web traffic has almost doubled from the first quarter of 2013 to the same period of 2014 (from 12.25% to 23.6%). On the other hand, the percentage of good bots decreased from just over 27% to 19.4% in the same period.

The problem with the increase in bad bots is the fact that organizations end up paying significant amounts of money for bandwidth that’s utilized by harmful traffic. However, bad traffic doesn’t only impact a certain category. ISPs, businesses and regular Internet users are all negatively impacted.

The report also shows that the top source for bad bots is the United States. In the US, the most significant bad bot activity is recorded between 6PM and 9PM ET.

Worryingly, for over 1,100 ISPs and hosting providers, 70% or even more of their total traffic is represented by bad bots. In 2013, the biggest botnet was Pushdo, which affected a total of 4.2 million IP addresses and almost as many computers.

Distil has also determined that of all industries, the financial services industry serves the highest percentage of bad traffic.

When it comes to the mobile environment, nine of the top ten global operators are affected by bad bots.

“The bad bot landscape is evolving fast, causing varied levels of harm to all Internet stakeholders, especially website owners. Bad bot volume will continue to grow for one simple reason—bots are an effective means to an end for the dark side of the Internet community. The annual report presents significant bad bot data and dispels some widely held views regarding their origins,” said Distil CEO and Co-founder Rami Essaid.

“For example, more bad bots originate from the United States than any other country. The intent of the Distil Bad Bot Landscape Report is to provide a thorough understanding of bad bot origins and makeup to help organizations prepare for, and mitigate, this rapidly accelerating security threat.”

In addition to the report, Distil has developed a bot that’s designed to check the date on which SSL certificates have been issued. This is important because many companies were forced to reissue certificates due to the Heartbleed bug.

The complete “Bad Bot Landscape Report” is available on Distil’s website.