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New study finds bots and fraud farms responsible for 73% of web traffic
(interestingengineering.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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The headline stat is a misinterpretation of the study which was done by Arkose Labs which "provides businesses with lasting bot prevention and account security by sapping the financial motivations of cybercriminals."
That's pretty vague but skimming it sounds like they prevent automated account creation and takeover. The stat comes from the companies they have access to (who need bot protection enough to pay for it), and 76% of activity on the login/account creation was malicious. That makes a lot more sense. All the various hacks and credential leaks result in bots banging in stolen credentials on high value sites.
Are you assuming though that that's 76%, once they've created an account, would do no fuether interaction with the Internet after that?
I'm not sure of the point that you're trying to make?
You think these bots are streaming movies and music? 73% of Internet traffic is not bots. It's all YouTube, Netflix, Insta, TikTok, Spotify, etc media consumption. 73% of login traffic may be bots, but it's a teeny drop of global traffic.
So you are assuming they're just logging in and not doing anything else, yes?
That there are no bots that (for example) watch YouTube videos and then gives them a like up or down, depending how they've been paid to do so, etc?
Well, I mean, if a bot protection company found malicious activity in account creation, I’m assuming they stopped the account from completing it…?
They could have let it continue to monitor it, in a honey-pot sort of way, to learn more about the bot, and it's network.
But I was asking towards intent, not success. Why would people have bots create accounts and then do absolutely nothing with those accounts afterwards?
I mean, that commenter said the headline was a misinterpretation because it's not 73% of web traffic, but only account creation attempts.
If the attempts are stopped, and the bot fails in creating an account, it isn't able to post/comment/do whatever it needed to do, and isn't contributing to "web traffic" as much as the other 27% of real people (or, well, uncaught bots).
Arkose does log-in protection for Roblox (and others but that's the one I'm familiar with) where the user has to do something like rotate a picture before logging in.