49.6% of all internet traffic came from bots in 2023, a 2% increase over the previous year, and the highest level Imperva has reported since it began monitoring automated traffic in 2013. For the fifth consecutive year, the proportion of web traffic associated with bad bots grew to 32% in 2023, up from 30.2% in 2022, while traffic from human users decreased to 50.4%. Automated traffic is costing organizations billions (USD) annually due to attacks … More →
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Yea. Along with web rings, human-focused search and just harbouring communities better ... we gotta start building people-focused online gardens and ditch this capitalistic hustle shit.
My CDN bill recently went from about $5 a month to over $200. Turned out it was Tictok’s spider relentlessly scraping the same content over and over again.
It was ignoring robots.txt. In the end I just had to ban their user agent in the CDN config.
Yeah, I'm wondering about how they characterize "bot activity." It seems like "any traffic not proximally related to a user's synchronous activity" is a little too broad.
I'm not sure if fediverse syncing is bot activity. Or my laptop checking for software updates while I'm sleeping. Or my autopay transactions for utility bills.
From the org’s definition of bots, I’d say it’s implicit that bot activity excludes expected communication in an infrastructure, client-server or otherwise. A bot is historically understood as an unexpected, nosy guest poking around a system. A good one might be indexing a website for a search engine. A bad one might be scraping email addresses for spammers.
In any case, none of the examples you give can be reasonably categorized as bots and the full report gives no indication of doing so.