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51% of Internet Traffic Is "Non-Human"
hypnosec writes "Cloud-based service Incapsula has revealed research indicating 51 per cent of website traffic is through automated software programs, with many programmed for malicious activity. The breakdown of an average site's traffic is as follows: 5% is due to hacking tools looking for an unpatched or new vulnerability within a site, 5% is scrapers, 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), and only 49% is from people browsing the Internet."
Hate to bring sources into a slashdot conversation, but Sandvine's 2011 report has 53.6% as "real-time entertainment". 29 percentage points are Netflix, 10 are YouTube.
So if those numbers are correct, roughly 15% of the Internet is porn.
Yeap, and that's the title of the ZDNet article, which was then copied by ITProPortal, which not only didn't add anything worthwhile, but also managed to fuck up the title.
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Here's the original ZDNet blog post. It's a longer article with more detail; it's also linked at the bottom of TFA, which seems to have plagiarized it. Compare the first paragraphs:
[TFA] Cloud-based service, Incapsula, has revealed research indicating that 51 per cent of website traffic is through automated software programs; with many programmed for the intent of malicious activity.
[ZDNet] Incapsula, a provider of cloud-based security for web sites, released a study today showing that 51% of web site traffic is automated software programs, and the majority is potentially damaging, — automated exploits from hackers, spies, scrapers, and spammers.
The sentence structure and order of ideas is identical, and many phrases are the same or nearly the same. A high schooler should do better. Minor rephrasing is not sufficient.
That said, both articles are pretty much advertisements. The study doesn't appear to have attempted to actually be comprehensive (so it only used data from this one company). The point was apparently to give this cloud service provider some selling points for businesses to use their service to "secure" their sites. This story is yet another that shouldn't even have appeared on /.; shame on the editors who let it through.