Non-human bots account for more than half of the world's internet traffic, according to a report.

Figures from web security company Incapsula suggest that bots represent 56% of all net traffic, and a growing number are believed to be malicious.

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Although the majority of bots are said to be beneficial to the internet, such as 'crawlers' that index web pages for search engines and social networks, the statistics suggest the number of 'bad' bots is on the rise.

So-called 'impersonator' bots that attempt to dupe users into entering personal data have risen by 15% in the last two years, according to Incapsula.

"Today, over 90% of all cyber-attacks that we mitigate are executed by bots and, as we are now seeing with Sony, the worst case scenario really depends on the attacker's intentions and the magnitude of the target," said Igal Zeifman, product evangelist and researcher at Incapsula.



"Bots can spam, scam, spy, execute denial of service attacks and hack - they can do whatever a human hacker 'teaches' them to do, only on a much (much) bigger scale - and this arguably delays the Internet's growth, both as a medium and as a place of business."

Although bots continue to outnumber human internet users, overall traffic from non-human agents has declined from 61.5% in 2013.

However, this has been attributed to a reduction in 'good' bots, including those associated with the now-defunct RSS reader service Google Reader.

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