The Asia-Pacific region has reported an unprecedented increase in artificial intelligence bot activity over the course of two months, with more than 10.5 billion interactions between AI bots registered in the said period. Such a tremendous volume is a spurt of 300% growth compared with the same period last year, making the APAC second only to North America, which was the most adversely impacted region in terms of the phenomenon of AI bot activity.
APAC network overload from AI bot traffic
The rapid growth in the number of AI bot requests has revolutionized the world of analytics on the traditional web. The effect has been the creation of billions of requests, leading to distorted business metrics for businesses in the Asian markets. The “commerce” and “digital media” sectors had the highest number of AI bot triggers, with over 6 billion between the two, showing the extent to which AI is scraping vital information from the rapidly developing online markets.
India was revealed to be the main target with 3.2 billion AI bot triggers, followed closely by Japan with 2.8 billion interactions, while China registered 1.7 billion bot triggers. Singapore took the fourth position among APAC countries, which contributed 899 million AI bot interactions. The Retail category contributed the highest number of interactions related to the commercial bot, comprising almost three-fourths of total interactions related to the commercial bot. Training bots accounted for 73.7% of the total AI bot interactions in the APAC region, which is consistent with the rapid adoption of AI solutions in the APAC region.
Why APAC organizations adopt cautious monitoring strategies
Notably, the manner in which APAC firms have taken steps to ensure the management of AI bot traffic is indeed cautious, with only 98.6% of these firms resorting to the process of monitoring the traffic, compared to the 91.1% observed in the North America category, which highlights the sensitivity with which the risks presented by AI are being assessed by the respective firms involved.
The problem that the organization is facing is the differentiation between the good type of bot, which is useful for search engine indexing, accessibility, etc., from the malicious type, which is FraudGPT or WormGPT, among others, that hike the operational cost, are detrimental to the websites, and are influencing key business metrics. The monitoring process enables the organization to gather intelligence without prematurely halting the beneficial automated interactions.
Regional bot activities breakdown
- India: 3.2 billion triggers
- Japan: 2.8 billion triggers
- China: 1.7 billion triggers
- Singapore: 899 million triggers
What the cybersecurity surge reflects about vulnerability
What is particularly alarming about the current explosion of AI bot threats is the level of complexity inherent in these attacks, which are fueled by the capabilities of artificial intelligence, aside from the numbers involved. The availability of AI-driven tools has made the threat landscape more accessible to both professional cyber attackers and “script kiddies” seeking to conduct attacks involving social engineering, the spread of phishing, identity fraud, among other crimes, created with the help of artificial intelligence-generated pictures or documents.
Reuben Koh, Director of Security Technology & Strategy, Akamai, highlighted the upcoming regional challenge, “The pace of AI automation is outstripping the readiness of many Asian-Pacific businesses, with AI robots currently comprising a substantial portion of the Web traffic. The majority of the firms are currently in the ‘Watch and Wait’ posture, watching but waiting before acting.”
The pace of the emergence of AI threats calls for the creation of comprehensive frameworks on how businesses can adopt AI in a secure manner. The more the automated processes are developed to be sophisticated, the more the business organization needs to be wary of how the AI-driven traffic will contribute to the growth of its business without undermining the integrity of its data or its operational security on the threat landscape.