Incapsula: 51 percent of website traffic is non-human

Cloud-based website security provider Incapsula released a report about online traffic and claims just 49 percent of of a website's visitors are real humans. The other 51 percent consists of search engines (20 percent), spies collecting competitive intelligence (19 percent), hacking tools searching for vulnerabilities (5 percent), content scrapers (5 percent) and comment spambots (2 percent).

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 company says that typically, only 49% of a web site’s visitors are actual humans and that the non-human traffic is mostly invisible because it is not shown by analytics software.

This means that web sites are carrying a large hidden cost burden in terms of bandwidth, increased risk of business disruption, and worse.

Source: ZD Net