The traffic on internet has increased literally exponentially over the recent few years. Millions of users have flocked to this online realm which has come about to change the very way we live and behave. However, it would be surprising to note that despite so many millions of users, more than half of internet’s traffic comes from non-human sources.
This has been revealed in a study by Incapsula, a company which provides cloud-based security for websites. According to this study, about 51% of the total internet traffic is generated by automated software or other non-human sources, many of which are potentially malicious. Some of these are automated exploits from hackers, some are simply spams and a lot of it is intelligence gathering software.
Only 49% of this total traffic is generated by genuine humans. The rest of it is non-human and is generated by automated software. For instance, 5% of the traffic is scrapers, another 5% are hacking tools looking for vulnerabilities at different places on websites. Spam contributes only 2% while 20% if from search engines which, although is non-human, but is not malicious.
What is somewhat surprising is that a huge 19% of the traffic is a result of ‘spies’ which are used to collect competitive intelligence. This data has been sampled from some 1,000 websites which directly used Incapsula’s services.
One significant aspect of this non-human traffic is that it is able to utilize a lot of bandwidth of a given server and can make accessing a website difficult or at times, impossible.
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