Since the start of public Internet use in April 1993, worldwide internet users have grown to 5 billion people as of April 2022, representing 63 percent of the world's total population. Similarly, the number of Internet-connected devices grew to 22 billion at the end of 2018. According to Statista, the number of internet of things (IoT) connected devices worldwide is estimated to reach 38.6 billion by 2025.
However, these numbers didn't include non-human internet automated programs popularly known as bots. According to Barracuda's most recent security report, the human race is a minority on the internet. The report found that humans make up less than 40 percent of the internet's traffic.
The Barracuda report reveals that automated traffic, including bots and hacking tools, takes up 64% of internet traffic. Of the 64%, 39% of all traffic was from bad bots, while just 25% of automated traffic was made up of good bots, such as search engine crawlers and social network bots. Humans represent 36% of all internet traffic.
That's not all. The report also included breaking down bad bot traffic by source and location. The report further showed that North America accounts for 67% of bad bot traffic, followed by Europe (22%) and then Asia (7.5%).
Commenting on the report, Nitzan Miron, VP of Product Management, Application Security, Barracuda, said: "While some bots like search engine crawlers are good, our research shows that over 60% of bots are dedicated to carrying out malicious activities at scale. These bad bots can steal data, affect site performance, and even lead to a breach when left unchecked. That's why it's critically important to detect and effectively block bot traffic."
Other studies have come out with similar findings. In a Twitter post yesterday, the World of Statistics said that "humans now only make up 38.5% of internet traffic. The other 61.5% is non-human (bots, hacking tools, etc.)."
In another study conducted by Professor Simon Hegelich in Munich, he found that many social media accounts can post thousands of comments daily, every day, and send messages and links. Professor Hegelich added that these robots act like humans, making it impossible for the ordinary online user to tell the difference.