Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the cloud company that powers and protects life online, has released a new State of the Internet (SOTI) report detailing the security and business threats organizations face due to the proliferation of web scraping bots. The report, titled “Scraping Away Your Bottom Line: How Web Scrapers Impact Ecommerce,” reveals that bots make up 42% of overall web traffic, and 65% of these bots are malicious.
The ecommerce sector, which heavily relies on revenue-generating web applications, has been most affected by high-risk bot traffic. While some bots are beneficial for businesses, web scraping bots are used for competitive intelligence, espionage, inventory hoarding, creation of imposter sites, and other schemes that negatively impact both financial results and customer experience. There are no laws prohibiting the use of web scraping bots, and they are difficult to detect due to the rise of AI-driven botnets, but there are some measures companies can take to mitigate them.
Patrick Sullivan, Akamai’s Chief Security Strategy Officer, stated, “Bots continue to present massive challenges resulting in multiple pain points for application owners and APIs. This includes scraping that can steal web data and produce brand impersonation sites. The scraping landscape is also changing due to advances like headless browser technology, which requires organizations to adopt a more sophisticated approach to managing this type of bot activity than other JavaScript-based mitigations.”
Key Findings from the Report:
– AI Botnets: These have the ability to discover and scrape unstructured data and content in a less consistent format or location. Additionally, they can use real business intelligence to enhance decision-making processes by collecting, extracting, and processing data.
– Phishing Campaigns: Web scraping bots can be leveraged to generate more sophisticated phishing campaigns by capturing product images, descriptions, and price information to create fake storefronts or phishing sites aimed at stealing credentials or credit card information.
– Opening New Fraudulent Accounts: Bots can facilitate abuse in opening new accounts, which, according to recent research, make up to 50% of fraud losses.
– Technical Impacts: Organizations face website performance degradation, site metric pollution, compromised credential attacks from phishing sites, increased computing costs, and more as a result of scraping, whether with malicious or beneficial intentions.
The “Scraping Away Your Bottom Line” report offers mitigation strategies against web scraping bots and presents a case study showing how websites operate much faster and more efficiently once defenses against these bots are implemented. Additionally, the research addresses compliance considerations that must be taken into account in the face of these increasingly frequent attacks.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of Akamai’s State of the Internet (SOTI) reports. The SOTI series provides expert insights on cybersecurity and web performance landscapes, based on data collected from Akamai Connected Cloud.