https://www.zdnet.com/article/bad-bots-focus-on-financial-targets-make-up-20... So-called "bad bots" can be tasked with performing denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, they can scrape and steal data, they may be used to automatically publish fake content or reviews, and also skew advertising and visitor metrics. Bots, in general, are estimated to make up roughly 37.9 percent of all Internet traffic. In 2018, one in five website requests -- 20.4 percent -- of traffic was generated by bad bots alone. According to Distil Networks' latest bot report, "Bad Bot Report 2019: The Bot Arms Race Continues," the financial sector is the main target for such activity, followed by ticketing, the education sector, government websites, and gambling. [...] A total of 73.6 percent of bad bots are classified as Advanced Persistent Bots (APBs), which are able to cycle through random IP addresses, switch their digital identities, and mimic human behavior. An example of this is mouse mimicry, in which the bot is able to simulate mouse events a genuine visitor may perform on a website domain. These tactics are used to try and appear as a legitimate user for the purposes of ad fraud, as well as brute-force attacks against online accounts, competitive data mining, transaction fraud, spam, and phishing campaigns. Amazon is the leading ISP for bad bot traffic origins. In total, 18 percent of bad bot traffic came from the firm's services, a jump from 10.62 percent in 2017. [...] The United States outstrips all other countries as a generator of bad bots. In total, 53.4 percent of bad bot traffic came from the US, followed by the Netherlands and China.