Cyberattacks against businesses doubled during 2021 compared to the year before with the main threat coming from bot traffic, according to new research from website security protection and monitoring company, SiteLock.
Alongside tackling everyday cyberthreats using the best antivirus software, SiteLock’s findings warn that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) need to do more as many are being targeted by growing numbers of automated cyberattacks.
Bot traffic appears to be the main culprit, accounting for 5.5 times the amount of human traffic during 2021 in comparison to 2020. Business websites were found to be seeing an average increase of 2,306 bot visits per site over the year before.
At the same time, SiteLock’s research indicated that while bot attacks had been increasing, volumes of human traffic had actually been decreasing. The findings reveal that malicious actors that employ bots to harvest their attacks had most success with SMB website owners who were largely oblivious to the threats.
SiteLock analyzed over 14 million websites in order to pin down the most prevalent cyberthreats. It identified Filehacker, which accounted for 35 percent of websites being infected with malware and Backdoor, responsible for 31 percent of attacks as being key offenders.
The research also highlighted that 93 percent of websites infected with malware had not been blacklisted, which equates to 9 out of 10 websites being missed by search engines. Websites are also being relentlessly attacked, around 172 times per day, with eight attacks occurring per minute.
The research suggests that around 4.1 million websites could now be affected with malware worldwide. Incredibly, 48 percent of SMB website owners still think they’re not big enough to be troubled by cyberthreats, despite half of them having already been breached.
The resulting advice from SiteLock is for businesses to ensure they have a comprehensive cybersecurity solution in place. Indeed, its own risk assessment tool can scrutinize the threat to SMB websites, analyzing over 500 variables and helping to prevent bad actors disrupting the everyday running of business websites.
“While there are legitimate reasons for bots to visit a website like search engine crawlers and copyright scans, bots are also used for a variety of nefarious purposes. Malicious bots can programmatically visit websites and identify vulnerabilities in code to execute their attacks, such as stealing data or inserting malware,” said Jason Soroko at Sectigo, which owns SiteLock.
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