Imperva Report Claims That 50% Of The World Wide Web Is Now Bots

May 7, 2024 by Maya Posch 50 Comments

Automation has been a part of the Internet since long before the appearance of the World Wide Web and the first web browsers, but it’s become a significantly larger part of total traffic the past decade. A recent report by cyber security services company Imperva pins the level of automated traffic (‘bots’) at roughly fifty percent of total traffic, with about 32% of all traffic attributed to ‘bad bots’, meaning automated traffic that crawls and scrapes content to e.g. train large language models (LLMs) and generate automated content as well as perform automated attacks on the countless APIs accessible on the internet.

According to Imperva, this is the fifth year of rising ‘bad bot’ traffic, with the 2023 report noting again a few percent increase. Meanwhile ‘good bot’ traffic also keeps increasing year over year, yet while these are not directly nefarious, many of these bots can throw off analytics and of course generate increased costs for especially smaller websites. Most worrisome are the automated attacks by the bad bots, which ranges from account takeover attempts to exploiting vulnerable web-based APIs. It’s not just Imperva who is making these claims, the idea that automated traffic will soon destroy the WWW has floated around since the late 2010s as the ‘Dead Internet theory‘.

Although the idea that the Internet will ‘die’ is probably overblown, the increase in automated traffic makes it increasingly harder to distinguish human-generated content and human commentators from fake content and accounts. This is worrisome due to how much of today’s opinions are formed and reinforced on e.g. ‘social media’ websites, while more and more comments, images and even videos are manipulated or machine-generated.

Social Engineering Is On The Rise: Protect Yourself Now

May 18, 2017 by Jack Laidlaw 31 Comments

As Internet security has evolved it has gotten easier to lock your systems down. Many products come out of the box pre-configured to include decent security practices, and most of the popular online services have wised up about encryption and password storage. That’s not to say that things are perfect, but as the computer systems get tougher to crack, the bad guys will focus more on the unpatchable system in the mix — the human element.

History Repeats Itself

Ever since the days of the ancient Greeks, and probably before that, social engineering has been one option to get around your enemy’s defences. We all know the old tale of Ulysses using a giant wooden horse to trick the Trojans into allowing a small army into the city of Troy. They left the horse outside the city walls after a failed five-year siege, and the Trojans brought it in. Once inside the city walls a small army climbed out in the dead of night and captured the city.

How different is it to leave a USB flash drive loaded with malware around a large company’s car park, waiting for human curiosity to take over and an employee to plug the device into a computer hooked up to the corporate network? Both the wooden horse and the USB drive trick have one thing in common, humans are not perfect and make decisions which can be irrational. Continue reading “Social Engineering Is On The Rise: Protect Yourself Now” →

Yet Another IoT Botnet

May 17, 2017 by Jack Laidlaw 19 Comments

[TrendMicro] are reporting that yet another IoT botnet is emerging. This new botnet had been dubbed Persirai and targets IP cameras. Most of the victims don’t even realize their camera has access to the Internet 24/7 in the first place.

Trend Micro, have found 1,000 IP cameras of different models that have been exploited by Persirai so far. There are at least another 120,000 IP cameras that the botnet could attack using the same method. The problem starts with the IP cameras exposing themselves by default on TCP Port 81 as a web server — never a great idea.

Most IP cameras use Universal Plug and Play, which allows them to open ports from inside the router and start a web server without much in the way of security checks. This paints a giant target in cyber space complete with signs asking to be exploited. After logging into a vulnerable device the attacker can perform a command injection attack which in turn points gets the camera to download further malware.

The exploit runs in memory only, so once it has been rebooted it should all be fine again until your next drive by malware download. Check your devices, because even big named companies make mistakes. IoT is turning into a battlefield. We just hope that with all these attacks, botnets, and hacks the promise of the IoT idea isn’t destroyed because of lazy coders.

Part of feature image from Wikipedia, Creative Commons license.

Industrial Robots, Hacking And Sabotage

May 4, 2017 by Jack Laidlaw 62 Comments

Everything is online these days creating the perfect storm for cyber shenanigans. Sadly, even industrial robotic equipment is easily compromised because of our ever increasingly connected world. A new report by Trend Micro shows a set of attacks on robot arms and other industrial automation hardware.

This may not seem like a big deal but image a scenario where an attacker intentionally builds invisible defects into thousands of cars without the manufacturer even knowing. Just about everything in a car these days is built using robotic arms. The Chassis could be built too weak, the engine could be built with weaknesses that will fail far before the expected lifespan. Even your brake disks could have manufacturing defects introduced by a computer hacker causing them to shatter under heavy braking. The Forward-looking Threat Research (FTR) team decided to check the feasibility of such attacks and what they found was shocking. Tests were performed in a laboratory with a real in work robot. They managed to come up with five different attack methods.

Attack 1: Altering the Controller’s Parameters
The attacker alters the control system so the robot moves unexpectedly or inaccurately, at the attacker’s will.

Concrete Effects: Defective or modified products
Requirements Violated: Safety, Integrity, Accuracy

Attack 2: Tampering with Calibration Parameters
The attacker changes the calibration to make the robot move unexpectedly or inaccurately, at the attacker’s will.

Concrete Effects: Damage to the robot
Requirements Violated: Safety, Integrity, Accuracy

Why are these robots even connected? As automated factories become more complex it becomes a much larger task to maintain all of the systems. The industry is moving toward more connectivity to monitor the performance of all machines on the factory floor, tracking their service lifetime and alerting when preventive maintenance is necessary. This sounds great for its intended use, but as with all connected devices there are vulnerabilities introduced because of this connectivity. This becomes especially concerning when you consider the reality that often equipment that goes into service simply doesn’t get crucial security updates for any number of reasons (ignorance, constant use, etc.).

For the rest of the attack vectors and more detailed info you should refer to the report (PDF) which is quite an interesting read. The video below also shows insight into how these type of attacks might affect the manufacturing process.

Continue reading “Industrial Robots, Hacking And Sabotage” →

Better Linux Through Coloring

March 7, 2017 by Al Williams 6 Comments

Cyber security is on everyone’s minds these days. Embedded devices like cameras have been used by bad guys to launch attacks on the Internet. People worry about data leaking from voice command devices or home automation systems. And this goes for the roll-your-own systems we build and deploy.

Many network-aware systems use Linux somewhere — one big example is pretty much every Raspberry Pi based project. How much do you think about security when you deploy a Pi? There is a superior security system available for Linux (including most versions you’d use on the Pi) called SELinux. The added letters on the front are for “Security-Enhanced” and this project was originally started by the NSA and RedHat. RedHat actually has — no kidding — a coloring book that helps explain some of the basic concepts.

We aren’t so sure the coloring book format is really the right approach here, but it is a light and informative read (we didn’t stay in the lines very well, though). Our one complaint is that it doesn’t really show you anything in practice, it just explains the ideas behind the different kind of protections available in SELinux. If you want to actually set it up on Pi, there’s a page on the Pi site that will help. If you have an hour, you can get a good overview of using SELinux in the video below.

Continue reading “Better Linux Through Coloring” →