Company
Date Published
Dec. 23, 2024
Author
Avi Jaisinghani, Adam Martinetti, Brian Mitchell
Word count
1544
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Cloudflare observed significant Grinch Bot activity on Black Friday 2024, with 29% of traffic being from these malicious programs. The number of bot requests increased by 4x compared to 2021, and AI bots made up 1% of all bot traffic, generating 29 billion requests alone. Bots targeted customer accounts, leading to 63% of login attempts on e-commerce sites, and 14.1 billion requests from bots to /login endpoints. Residential proxy networks accounted for 22% of bot activity, making it challenging for traditional bot defense mechanisms to detect and stop attacks. To protect themselves, businesses need year-round bot protection and proactive strategies tailored to the unique challenges of holiday shopping. Cloudflare offers solutions such as Bot Management, account abuse detections, rate-limiting best practices, and automatic AI bot blocking features to help customers keep Grinch Bots at bay.