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Last year was the first time in history that bots outnumbered people on the web. According to research from Distil Networks, almost 60% of 2014’s web traffic consisted of automated bits of code, 23% of which exist to do dirty work for fraudsters and hackers. “It’s getting worse,” says Rami Essaid, Distil’s CEO. “Over the past ten years, they went from just kind of being out there and easy to detect to being really, really sophisticated.”
But hackers also use bots for all sorts of nefarious reasons, from lifting credit card numbers from an online store to scraping the text off an article and posting it on some random blog. (The nerve!) In fact, digital publishers get hit hardest by bad bots, with almost one-third of the traffic crawling on sites like this [ interjection - "sites like this" meaning blogs and not sites like ATS ] being malicious programs. (Sorry about that.) Travel sites, online stores, and real estate pages also abound with compu-critters.
While websites large and small should do more to battle bad bots, Distil’s report tosses blame at some surprising sources — like Amazon, China, and T-Mobile. Bad bots make up 78% of the traffic put out by Amazon, whose simple-to-setup cloud services power much of the web. “They’ve also made it real easy for bad guys to spin up servers, create bots, and do all sorts of bad things — and they don’t police it,” says Essaid.
originally posted by: Hefficide
a reply to: funbox
Ah but see now there's a three out of five chance that you or I aren't even human... Think about the implications!
originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
This is pretty creepy news, though. I am terrified of the singularity, to be honest.
originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
You know, i heard that about you. "Old Heff...he's just a robot".
LOL
This is pretty creepy news, though. I am terrified of the singularity, to be honest.
originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
a reply to: Skid Mark
facon....
```shudder```