Data from cybersecurity firm Imperva shows a sharp increase in bot traffic in the final months of 2020. According to the company, an analysis of bot behavior over the past year (which now accounts for more than a quarter of all web requests) shows that the key launch period leading up to the holiday season saw a significant increase in bot traffic heading to retail websites to buy up inventory The company said.

The company reported a 788% increase in bot activity to retail websites between September and October 2020 alone.

As noted in the report, the dates of the sharp increase in bot activity coincide with the release of both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Furthermore, PC gamers will recall that Nvidia's RTX 30 series and AMD's RX 6000 series graphics cards were released around the same time.

If you think that's too many horrible statistics for one day, stay away from the full Imperva Bad Bot Report 2021. The report is chock-full of frightening statistics about shady web surfers that will infuriate any would-be consumer of PC hardware. [Edward Roberts, director of application security strategy at Imperva, said, "As we have monitored over the past eight years, malicious bots continue to ravage the Internet, and the characteristics of their attacks have become more sophisticated and nuanced over time. Throughout the past year, and in the midst of a global pandemic, malicious bots have targeted new markets and thrived, and their impact now extends to the everyday consumer."

The retailers I spoke with convey a similar message. Bot strategies are constantly changing, and defenses must constantly shift to keep up with and prevent the effects of bots.

Imperva calls bots that specifically target high-value items at Christmas "Grinch bots."

The data in this report is drawn from Imperva's own network of cybersecurity products, and the company's stake in the anti-bot business is definitely something to keep in mind when reading the report.

Imperva states that its dataset only reports malicious bot activity at the application layer. This is an important distinction, the report explains, because it excludes bot activity that is typically found as part of DDoS attacks.

Of course, such activity is much more widespread than retailers and Grinchbots. Healthcare websites, mobile browsers, government websites, and news sites all remain popular destinations for digital ne'er-do-wells. Phishing, fraud, scraping, theft, and account hacking are all cited as relatively common uses for bots online.

The report notes that sites in the U.S. are the most exposed to malicious bot traffic, with China in second place and the U.K. in third. The U.S. also leads the pack in terms of bot origin, as these bots are said to originate most often from the same countries they target.

But don't worry. There are some "good bots" out there fighting the good fight for useful information and automation. Occasionally, there are bots that completely screw up web analytics or slow down servers for legitimate human users.

The scale of bot use remains a vague concept when it comes to the resale of PC parts. The actual numbers on the web may differ somewhat from those collected by Imperva's system, but even as a snapshot of the possible scale of malicious bot activity, these numbers give us a glimpse of what we have to contend with today just to get our hands on the latest silicon They give us a glimpse.