[ISN] 'Non-Humans' Account for 51% of All Internet Traffic

[InfoSec News <alerts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/03/non-humans-account-51-all-interent-traffic/49967/

By Dino Grandoni
The Atlantic Wire
March 15, 2012

By one study's measure, slightly more than half of all the Internet's 
traffic comes from computers not being used by fleshy humans that might 
actually purchase products.

That's according to study released today by Incapsula, an Internet 
security firm, begging the question: What exactly does Internet traffic 
from a "non-human" look like? Incapsula is here to explain: "hackers, 
spambots, scrapers and spies of sorts collecting proprietary business 
information and customer data from unsuspecting websites." "Hackers" (5 
percent) refers to hacking software that visits site to swipe 
credit-card information or crash sites (think of the ubiquitous DDoS 
attacks). "Scrapers" (another 5 percent) refer to bots that copy content 
from other sites and post it on their own, to get search-engine traffic. 
Altogether, the robotic ne'er-do-wells cited above constitutes 31 
percent of all web traffic. The other 20 percent is the search engines 
themselves, the Googles and Bings of the Interwebbed world, whose 
servers work 'round-the-clock to index the Internet for our browsing 
pleasure.

[...]


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