Bots Consume The Internet, Now Make Up Over 60 Percent Of All Website Traffic

Robots haven't taken over the physical world like they nearly have in several blockbuster movies, but "Bots" continue to invade cyber space, according to the institute of Engineering and Technology.

Bots, or software that performs automated tasks, represented just over 60 percent of all website traffic in 2013, whereas last year the split was closer to 50-50, according to a study by the web security firm Incapsula. Their first study generated so much buzz -- and provided deeper context into the numbers generated by Google analytics and other services -- that they felt compelled to release another one just a year later, according to their blogger, Igal Zeifman.

Occupying 31 percent of all traffic and over 50 percent of bot traffic, nearly all of the overall growth can be attributed to "good bots," or those that make the internet a more efficient medium through a myriad of functions. Much of this group contributes to search engines, according to Incapsula.

Though the total number of malicious bots hasn't changed since the last report, their make-up has. For example, spam bots are down from 2 percent to .5 percent, likely because of new measures initiated by Google, according to Incapsula. "Other Impersonators," known as "unclassified bats with hostile intentions," increased by 8 percent from last year and now make up 20 percent of all web traffic. They're associated with sophisticated hackers and can lead to illegal market intelligence gathering, server downtime, and service degradation.

"The common denominator for this group is that all of its members are trying to assume someone else's identity," Incapsula's Igal Zeifman wrote. "For example, some of these bots use browser user-agents while others try to pass themselves as search engine bots or agents of other legitimate services. The goal is always the same - to infiltrate their way through the website's security measures."

Overall, malicious bots comprised 31 percent of internet traffic. Scrapers (5 percent) and hacking tools (4.5 percent) make up the remaining two categories.