Almost half of all traffic in RuNet in 2022 was generated by bots

In 2022, 40.5% of all traffic on RuNet was accounted for by bots, automated programs capable of performing various tasks on the network. This is 5 percentage points (p.p.) more than in 2021, said Georgy Tarasov, Qrator.AntiBot product manager at Qrator Labs. Accordingly, Internet traffic generated by people decreased over the year from 64.5% to 59.5%, follows from the company’s data.

According to the TelecomDaily agency, the total volume of fixed traffic in Runet in 2022 increased by 16% – from 78 to 91 exabytes (a quintillion bytes. – Vedomosti). Mobile traffic grew by 18% in 2022, from 29.6 exabytes to 35 exabytes.

“Good” bots – for example, search robots that take part in scanning and indexing web resources, and bots for checking resources for vulnerabilities – accounted for about 17.5% of total traffic. Their average share over the year changed slightly, within 1 percentage point, Tarasov noted.

At the same time, the share of “bad”, or malicious, bots in 2022 increased from 19% to 23%, Tarasov said. The growth of bot traffic in Runet Vedomosti was confirmed by Luka Safonov, technical director of Synclit JSC, and Daniil Bobryshev, owner of the Servicepipe DosGate product. Bobryshev also noted that during the first half of 2023, the number of malicious bots continued to increase, showing an increase of 5–6% compared to the same period in 2022. “Bad” bots collect confidential information about users, leave spam comments and fake reviews , “click through” ads (i.e., burn the advertising budget, ensuring the achievement of indicators in terms of the number of impressions), and can also stop the site, generating an infinite number of requests (performing DDos attacks), the FAC.C.T. (former Group-IB) for combating financial fraud Dmitry Dudkov. The traffic of malicious bots, according to him, poses a threat to all online resources, regardless of the industry. But if earlier they threatened more online stores and marketplaces, then recently their activity has been observed in the financial sector, energy, housing and communal services, medicine, education and entertainment.

The growth of traffic generated by bots on the Internet is a global trend. Analysts at the American information security company Imperva calculated that in 2022 “human” traffic fell to its lowest level in eight years and amounted to 52.6%, while the remaining 47.5% were bots. The Imperva study also confirms data on the growth of “bad” bot traffic: in 2022, their share in the world increased to 30.2%, which is 2.5 p.p. more than in 2021. In the top three countries, Germany (68.6%), Ireland (45.1%) and Singapore (43.1%), where malicious bot traffic exceeds the global average.

The growth in the number of bots is directly related to the development of technology and the increasing automation of processes on the Internet, explains Bobryshev. The situation was also affected by the simplification of the bot development process and the scaling of fraudulent schemes, Dudkov added. Bots used to collect content, spam, attacks on accounts have become cheaper to maintain, which allows attackers to easily increase their power and number, Tarasov noted.

The general trend is to reduce the price of computing resources, so the use of bots is only getting cheaper, Ramil Khantimirov, co-founder and CEO of StormWall, confirms. The development of the Internet of things (IoT) is also making a significant contribution – more than 14 billion of these devices are already connected to the Internet and have security problems, which makes them an essential part of botnets, he adds.

Among the reasons for the growth in the traffic of “good” bots is the development of artificial intelligence, said Alexander Sivolobov, deputy head of the NTI Competence Center based on Skoltech for wireless communication and the Internet of things. A simple request to ChatGPT, he says, triggers a whole series of interactions between various digital services. For example, when asked to plan a tourist trip, the AI ​​will take into account the weather forecast, tourist reviews, hotel and airfare availability to suggest the best option, the expert said: “All these internal exchanges of information between various digital systems are an example of “good” bot traffic.”

Experts believe that bot traffic will continue to grow and will exceed the proportion of “human” traffic in the coming years. The ease of implementation of bots both on platforms like Telegram and as an independent service and the further digitalization of society is a good driver for this, argues Ruslan Permyakov, deputy director of the NTI Competence Center “Trusted Interaction Technologies”. The prevailing share of bots in Internet traffic is a matter of time, Mikhail Sergeev, Leading Engineer of CorpSoft24, agrees. For example, in the American Twitter at the moment there are about 90% of bots and 10% of real people, in the Russian segment the number of bots is also growing very rapidly, the expert added.