Germany has by far the highest rate of malicious bots on the Internet in the world

So-called bad bots are up to mischief, especially in German networks. (Image: Maqbool – adobe.stock.com)

Imperva, the cyber security market leader, has published its tenth annual Bad Robot Report for 2022. This provides information about the development of bot technology and automated data traffic.

Data traffic in 13 countries was examined for the report. Surprising: Germany has by far the most harmful bots up to mischief.

Germany: 68.6 percent bad bots

Bad bots are automated programs or scripts that operate on the Internet and perform negative or harmful activities. As opposed to good Bots used by search engines or other legitimate services to gather statistics and information are often bad bots with malicious intent.

• Web Scraping
• Fraud and Phishing
• DDoS attacks
• account abuse
• Price and inventory manipulation
• Brute force attacks
• Spamming
• data theft
• Click Fraud

Of the 13 countries analyzed in the report, seven had bad bot traffic above the 2022 global average of 30.2 percent. Germany is the lone leader with 68.6 percent.

This is followed by Ireland with 45.1 percent and Singapore with 43.1 percent. The USA was also slightly above average at 32.1 percent.

You can read here how hackers use ChatGPT for phishing emails and how you can protect yourself:

47 percent of all Internet traffic from bots

More specifically, 47.4 percent of all internet traffic was handled by bots, a 5.1 percent increase from 2021. The same report shows that human traffic fell to its lowest level in eight years at 52.6 percent.

Unsurprisingly: Travel (24.7 percent), retail (21 percent), and financial services (12.7 percent) saw the most bot visits.

Also not surprising: Websites and apps with the core topics gaming (58.7 percent) and telecommunications (47.7 percent) had the most attacks from bad bots.

This is the most used browser by bots: Apple’s Safari browser, especially the mobile version, was used the most by non-human visitors.

We have three articles with important tips for self-protection for you:

Almost half of all traffic generated online is caused by bots, in Germany almost 69 percent of this can be attributed to harmful bots. Would you have guessed that? Do you think the number of non-human website visitors will continue to increase? What can we do against bad bots? If you have tips for self-protection, feel free to type them in the comments.