Bots have long been used as a way to harness large amounts of idle compute power. But is there a dark side to how they could be put to work? IoT devices, such as the Nest smart thermostat, are very powerful computers, which are often idle for 99% of the time. If cyber criminals can find a way into a large number of IoT devices and take them over, without the knowledge of the owners, what would the consequences be? Potentially a massive bonnet. IoT manufacturers need to place security at the heart of the design of their IoT devices, and include a way to monitor the IoT activity.
Bots are essentially the worker bees of the web, used to power search engines such as Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo. Imperva's fourth annual Bot Traffic Report reveals that bots account for almost half of all internet traffic (49 percent). Online traffic in 2015 consisted of humans (51.5 percent), ‘good' bots (19.5 percent) and ‘bad' bots (29 percent).
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