This, along with climate, large-scale language models, and the increasingly ubiquitous implementation of the Oxford Comma, is further evidence of the impending demise of civilization. It is reported that bots now account for nearly half of all Internet traffic. [This is according to the 2024 Bad Bot Report, published by cybersecurity specialist Imperva via SecurityBrief. The headline figure shows that bots account for 49.6% of all Internet traffic. Even worse is the 32% of total traffic associated with so-called "bad bots."

"Bots are one of the most pervasive and growing threats facing any industry. From simple web scraping to malicious account takeovers, spam, and denial of service, bots can negatively impact an organization's bottom line," said Nanhi Singh, general manager of application security at Imperva, perhaps with an apathetic sigh of defeat, stated.

Imperva found that malicious bot traffic varied quite significantly by region. For example, Ireland topped the list with 71%, Germany 67.5%, and Mexico 42.8%. It is not clear whether this means that 71% of all Internet traffic in Ireland is malicious bots or that 71% of Ireland's bot traffic is malicious. Certainly (pardon the pun), there are many malicious bots.

Furthermore, we gamers have not been left out of this problem. In fact, according to Imperva, the percentage of bot traffic in games was 57.2%, considered the largest of all "sectors." Good luck! Nevertheless, Imperva does not reveal the ratio of good to bad bots in the game.

Retail bots achieved just 24.4% of traffic, travel bots accounted for 20.7% of the sector's traffic, and financial services, with just 15.7% of traffic, were relegated to a desperate category that is difficult to assimilate into humanity.

Imperva further speculates that "advanced" malicious bots, supposedly capable of mimicking human behavior and evading defenses, were most common on law and government, entertainment, and financial services websites.

In other words, the overarching narrative here is that all houses are riddled with bots. As more AI-enabled tools are deployed, bots will become omnipresent." Organizations need to invest in bot management and API security tools to manage threats from malicious automated traffic," added Imperva's Nanhi Singh.

All of this becomes quite depressing when one considers the energy footprint of the entire Internet and the megawatt hours consumed by malicious bots chasing us and each other around the Internet and training each other with terrible AI-generated content.

What exactly can be done about any of this is an open question. Rather ironically, it is tempting to appeal to AI as a potential solution to all the malicious bots and nonsense content. But it seems rather circular and zero-sum; the AI battle of wits seems to end only in one direction. Yes, it's an apocalyptic wasteland and pile of skulls.

Or maybe that's a bit pessimistic and all we need to do is manage our passwords a bit better, not click on dodgy links, and go easy on social. Please fight the death of the Internet in the comments below.