Just over half (51%) of all website traffic originates from automated software programs, rather than humans, according to a new study.
The research, from cloud-based service Incapsula, found that 31% of all traffic can actually harm businesses.
Incapsula provided a breakdown of the average site’s traffic as follows:
• 5% is due to hacking tools looking for an unpatched or new vulnerability within a site
• 5% is scrapers (spam sites that copies content from other websites)
• 2% is from automated comment spammers
• 19% is the result of ‘spies’ collating competitive intelligence
• 20% is derived from search engines (non-human traffic but benign)
• 49% is from people browsing the Internet.
“Website owners who think they know who is visiting their sites should think again. Anyone who relies on Google analytics to view site traffic is simply blind to a significant amount of business-damaging visitors and bots that hack your site, steal your customer’s data including credit card information, share your proprietary business knowledge, and more.” says Marc, Gaffan Co-Founder, Incapsula.
He continued, “As website owners work hard to attract good human traffic, it’s just as important to see and block these bad guys. We revealed these findings that we see on a daily basis to demonstrate the real risks that website owners are typically unaware of, but exposed to on a daily basis.”
Incapsula collected the data in these findings from an anonymous sample of 1,000 Incapsula customers with an average of 50,000 to 10,000 monthly visitors.
More information and graphic displays of these findings including the most common website threats, the damage they cause, their modus operandi and their typical targets are on the Incapsula blog here.
Source: www.Incapsula.com/the-incapsula-blog
