A new report by cybersecurity firm Imperva reveals that bots now account for 51% of all global internet traffic as of 2024, surpassing human activity for the first time in a decade.

The travel sector has seen a significant increase in bot attacks, which now make up 27% of all attacks, with bad bots comprising 41% of travel traffic.

In 2024, an average of 2 million AI-enabled attacks occurred daily, with the Bytespider web crawler involved in 54% of these incidents.

Account takeover (ATO) attacks surged by 40% in 2024, with financial services being the primary target, accounting for 22% of ATOs.

AI tools like ChatGPT and ByteSpider Bot are transforming how attackers execute cyber threats, leading to more sophisticated and evasive automated attacks.

The accessibility of AI tools has lowered the barrier for cyber attackers, enabling them to create and deploy malicious bots more easily.

Sophisticated bots are increasingly mimicking human behavior, complicating efforts to distinguish between bots and legitimate users.

Organizations are urged to adopt proactive cybersecurity strategies and utilize sophisticated bot detection tools to combat the growing threat of automated attacks.

Tim Chang from Thales Cybersecurity Products warns that the prevalence of bad bots poses increasing risks to businesses worldwide.

The report indicates that blocking 13 trillion bad bot requests across various domains in 2024 illustrates the growing risks of automated attacks.

While not all bots are malicious, bad bots pose significant challenges for cybersecurity, highlighting the need for better defenses against these automated threats.

AI tools can facilitate spamming campaigns and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that disrupt websites by flooding them with fake traffic.