AI is Making Bots Harder to Detect Than Ever

Akamai Technologies has released a new State of the Internet (SOTI) report detailing the increasing challenges posed by AI-driven web scraping bots. The report, titled "Scraping Away Your Bottom Line: How Web Scrapers Impact Ecommerce," reveals that bots now account for 42% of web traffic, with 65% classified as malicious.

The ecommerce sector is particularly affected by these high-risk bots, which are used for competitive intelligence, inventory hoarding, and imposter site creation, among other malicious activities. The rise of AI botnets has made detection more difficult, as they can scrape unstructured data and use business intelligence to enhance their operations.

Key findings include:

• AI botnets' ability to discover and scrape unstructured data.

• Use of scraper bots to create sophisticated phishing campaigns.

• New account opening abuse facilitated by bots, contributing to up to 50% of fraud losses.

• Technical impacts such as website performance degradation and increased compute costs.

Akamai’s report provides mitigation strategies and case studies demonstrating improved website performance after implementing bot defenses. This marks the 10th anniversary of Akamai's SOTI reports, offering insights based on data from Akamai Connected Cloud.