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."

Comments

Obligatory

[Warhawke]

http://funpics.classicfun.ws/var/albums/Funpics/On%20the%20Internet%20nobody%20knows%20you're%20a%20dog.jpg?m=1300661194

Re:Obligatory

[cosm]

When the singularity arrives, it wont be the T-900 to fear, but instead incessant little gnat-bots that swarm anything with a wallet. It seems the internet is denigrating to just another platform of the one true age-old human behavior--scheming and conning to get the most precious thing you have. Your personal information and your money. And this does not surprise me--for a technological system/network created by humans will be just as full of our flaws and intrinsic 'mental' malfunctions as any non-silicon process our species oversees. Evolutionary my dear Watson.

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds a lot like the singularity in Accelerando. Basically the computer programs end up being so much richer than the humans that the story follows some humans that run away from the solar system because otherwise they can't afford to live.

Hmmm

[koan]

"only 49% from people browsing the Internet." I wonder how much of that 49% is porn.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

web !=internet

[Anonymous Coward]

the article seems to be about websites, not the intetnet

Re:But what about...

[Anonymous Coward]

... PORN?!?

It says right there in the summary: "only 49% from people browsing the Internet." Although you could argue that it's higher than that since spiders must crawl through porn too. Adding the 20% for the search spiders, we have that 69% of web traffic is porn related. A fitting number, I dare say.

if you run wordpress...

[powerspike]

If you run wordpress for your site... It's more like 50% Bots (search engines), 40% Comment Spam, and 8% Content Scanners and 2% Visitors....

Re:Bad Title / Summary

[Dahamma]

The summary is ok, but the title is completely wrong. It could well be 51% of HTTP requests, but far as 'Internet traffic", it's probably a tiny fraction of a percent.

In fact, why is it even surprising or newsworthy that 50% of HTTP requests are malicious? Anyone who runs a public web server will be able to see that pretty quickly (though as long as it's configured correctly the actual traffic will be tiny (consisting of a whole bunch of 404's).

Re:95% of the 49% are missing a chromosome or two

[Anonymous Coward]

4chan -- where the men are men, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents.

Web != Internet

[wiredlogic]

Seriously. Do they have liberal arts majors writing the headlines at /. now?

Better link, crappy story

[FrootLoops]

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.

Consider the source

[Gravis Zero]

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.

and it just so happens that Incapsula has the perfect solution to save you from all this... for a price.

IPv6 to the rescue

[WaffleMonster]

With IPv6 no more wholesale scanning of the entire global address space in minutes time looking for expliotable hosts. No more 5 minutes to ownage of unpatched PCs and the associated waste of bandwidth.

No more self propogating worms using simple algorithms to divide and conquer the global network.

In the grand scheme of things it won't help much but better than nothing.