India leads Asia-Pacific in AI bot activity with 300 per cent surge: Report

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Amid the rising AI trends across the globe, India now leads the Asia-Pacific region in AI bot activity. A report on Wednesday said that India witnessed a 300 per cent increase in automated traffic globally over the past year.

As reported by news agency IANS, AI bots generated 3.2 billion triggers in India, positioning the country as one of the most targeted in the APAC region. India is further followed by Japan and China, said the report from cybersecurity and cloud computing company Akamai Technologies.

The report published by a cybersecurity firm revealed an alarming spike in automated traffic driven largely by AI-powered bots targeting websites across all industries.

These bots generate billions of requests, significantly distorting digital operations and analytics, and make up nearly 1 per cent of total bot traffic on Akamai's platform.

The spike is primarily caused by content scraping, which undermines traditional web-based business models, publisher analytics, and ad revenue.

While enlightening about the rising AI bot traffic, the report said, As bot traffic grows, publishers and other content-driven businesses are seeing corrupted analytics and collapsing ad revenues through bots extracting value without giving any in return.

The report further revealed that "The rapid growth of AI-enabled tools has made it easier than ever for both experienced threat professionals and new malicious actors to launch impersonation attacks, conduct social engineering, distribute phishing campaigns, and commit identity fraud using AI-generated fake documents and images," as cited by news agency IANS.

In addition, malicious bots such as FraudGPT, WormGPT, ad fraud bots, and return fraud bots have been driving up the costs, degrading site performance, and skewing key metrics.

According to global research, almost 25 billion bot queries were recorded during a two-month observation period. With the commerce sector leading the way in AI bot activity, the country observed a large inclination amid the AI bot activity.

However, in the digital media sector, publishing was most affected, accounting for 63% of AI bot triggers.

According to the report, scraping, mostly by search and training bots, accounts for over 90% of AI bot triggers in the healthcare industry.

(With inputs from IANS)