Non-human, malicious codes make up 51% of Internet traffic

The Internet is a massive place and there’s a lot of information passing through it every minute and one would assume that all the traffic is to do with humans, but it so appears that this isn’t the case. Incapsula, a security solution for cloud services has released a report (covered by ZDNet) stating that some 51 percent of all traffic on the Internet comes from non-humans or from malicious codes. The rest is the data being accessed by humans. Most of the non-human traffic is not really accounted for by analytics solutions on the web, so they don’t really show up in stats. This is a massive amount of bandwidth and resources that are to be wasted on data that isn’t really of any use, really. A lot of money is spent by everyone from users to organizations and service providers to upgrade hardware to keep up with demands. Considering half of it, isn’t human traffic, that’s a huge waste of money. 

Too much non-human traffic on the web

The report breaks down the traffic that a typical website on the Internet gets. Apparently, some 20 percent traffic is from search engines, which is technically, not human traffic, but this bit isn’t really malicious in any way. Another 19 percent or so of the traffic comes from spies who are scouring the web and their competition. The remainder of the traffic comes from tools that are accessing websites looking for vulnerabilities and then there are the spammers who go around posting comments on forums and sites. This study was done by monitoring some 1000 websites on the web that are covered by Incapsula. 

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Incapsula comes in here and claims to help by first analyzing the kind of traffic coming to their client’s servers and quickly blocking exploits before they hit the servers. The end result is a much faster server that lets users load pages quicker. This is done not by installing Incapsula software on the clients server, but by simply making changes to some DNS records, so that the requests are directed through Incapsula. Incapsula has some nine data centres placed around the world to handle requests from their clients.