Fastly research finds link between increased commerce cyberattacks and higher bot traffic

Fastly, Inc. today released its Q1 2025 Threat Insights Report, providing an overview of security trends, attack vectors, and threat activity across the application security landscape.

The report reveals that the commerce industry’s attack volume doubled from 15% in Q1 2024 to 31% in Q1 2025, signaling a shift in attacker focus. Additionally, the report found that 37% of all observed internet traffic is from automated traffic or bots, with 89% of that bot traffic classified as unwanted, further illustrating the challenges faced by online businesses.

Identifying wanted and unwanted bot traffic is crucial for businesses. Unwanted bot traffic, including malicious bot traffic, can conduct account takeovers, ad fraud, or data theft. Conversely, search engine crawlers, which accounted for 66% of wanted bot traffic, can drive visibility and traffic to websites.

“As bots make up a growing portion of internet traffic, the ability to tell the difference between useful and unwanted automation is becoming more important,” said Simran Khalsa, Staff Security Researcher at Fastly. “If you’re not actively managing bot traffic, you could be spending on infrastructure, bandwidth, or performance that is effectively being wasted on serving malicious or non-productive traffic.”

Fastly’s quarterly threat insights report draws from 6.5 trillion monthly requests (as of April 22, 2025) across its Next-Gen WAF, Bot Management, and DDoS Protection solutions.

Key Q1 2025 findings include:

• Attacks on the commerce industry doubled, rising to 31% of all observed attacks in Q1 2025 from 15% of all observed attacks in Q1 2024.

• 37% of all observed traffic originated from bots, with 89% of bot traffic classified as unwanted.

• Commerce websites attracted the largest proportion of unwanted bot traffic at 39%.

• High-technology organizations were the most targeted industry overall, representing 35% of observed attacks.

• Attempted logins using compromised passwords averaged over 1.3 million per day in March 2025, driven in part by the use of proxy services to automate activities.

To access the Fastly Q1 2025 Threat Insights Report, visit https://learn.fastly.com/security-threat-insights-report.