Are Robots Taking Over the Internet?

Morpheous-on-web-trafficDo you want to know what the Internet really is? The Internet is everywhere, it’s all around us. You can see it when you look out your window or turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work. Like have you ever been online and got that eerie feeling you’re talking to a bunch of robots? That’s because you really are, see, bots now make up 61.5% of all website traffic in 2013, with just 38.5% of visits being man made. Bot visits are up 21% since 2012 when overall web traffic was a virtual split between humans and machines. The report by Incapsula, looks at 1.45 billion bot visits on 20,000 sites (in 249 countries) over a 90 day period.

Now before you start freaking out like Neo in The Matrix, it turns out that a third of the bot traffic is actually considered of the good variety, like search engines spiders crawling your site or other useful apps that you may have purposely running on your site like for social sharing (like IFTTT) or analytics (Google and SEO). Also these good bots make up a 55% majority of the increase in overall bot visits. However, 66% of bot traffic is malicious still consisting of scrapers, hackers, spammers and other dodgy impersonators. These entities are looking to steal your data, passwords, credit card information and worse through various schemes like phishing, injecting malware into your system or even more sophisticated hacker activity (up 20.5% year over year).

bot-traffic-report-2013

Now the good news is that search engines like Google and content management systems like WordPress have more sophisticated tools than ever to deal with spammers, thus we’ve seen a dramatic 75% drop since 2012 in spam. Also, here are some good resources to help you out if your website has been hacked plus some advice from Morpheus himself.

Unfortunately though, no one can be told what the Internet is, you have to see it for yourself. But remember, after you watch this, there is no turning back…

Daniel Zeevi

By Daniel Zeevi

Daniel is a social network architect, web developer, infographic designer, writer, speaker and founder of DashBurst. Full-time futurist and part-time content curator, always on the hunt for disruptive new technology, creative art and web humor.