Did you know that almost half of the people visiting your website aren’t actually people at all? That’s right – about 45% of all web traffic is comprised of robots. And many of them are out to get you.
Fortunately, not all bots are harmful. Many bots are just web crawlers that explore websites and read their pages to create entries for search engine indexes, making it easier for everyone to find information. There are bots that provide real-time updates on weather, sports, currency rates, and other news. Other bots assist with comparison shopping by locating the best prices on items. Copyright bots scan the internet for copied content. These “good bots” make up about 27% of all web traffic. Read: Bad Bots, Good Bots, and Humans: Quantifying the Risk of Bad Bots
The remaining 18% or so of bots, however, are the “bad bots” you need to worry about. These bots also automate tasks, but of the malicious variety – data theft, account hijacking, online fraud, web scraping, data mining, spam, and many other types of malevolence.
In fact, Aberdeen research has found that the median annualized business impact of bad bots under the status quo (manual blocking) is about $4,183,000, while the median annualized risk of bad bots is estimated to be about 4.2% of website revenue.
These bots are also getting more and more sophisticated. They are evolving to better mimic human behavior, making them much more difficult for many existing security solutions to detect. And the biggest threats are usually the ones you don’t see. Organizations need to understand and quantify the risks that bad bots represent.
With these challenges in mind, Distil Networks has incorporated Aberdeen’s comprehensive data modeling and analytics into their new Bad Bot Risk Calculator. This interactive tool is designed to help organizations understand and quantify the economic risk posed by bad bots.
The Bad Bot Risk Calculator can personalize your analysis based on your company’s industry, website traffic, number of data records, and website revenue, to calculate the risk of bad bots on your business. This gives security professionals the information they need to answer fundamental business questions, such as the risk of bad bots under the status quo of manual blocking, and the value of countermeasures such as a web application firewall or advanced bot mitigation.
“Security teams are not only responsible for identifying risk – they also need to help senior business leaders understand the implications of those risks, in business terms, and present them with potential solutions,” said Derek Brink, vice president and research fellow for Aberdeen Group. “The Bad Bot Calculator is designed to make fact-based estimates, which in turn can help IT and business leaders make better-informed business decisions.”
The bad bots are coming. What’cha gonna do when they come for you? Try the Bad Bot Risk Calculator today to make sure your organization is safe and sound.