Security News > 2020 > May > Akamai CTO on how bots are used online in legal and illegal ways
Learn what a bot is, the spectrum of ways bots are used online, and how bots might be used in the next election cycle.
Dan Patterson, CNET and CBS News Senior Producer, spoke with Patrick Sullivan, Akamai CTO, Security Strategy, about the programming and use cases of bots.
Dan Patterson: If I understand you correctly, the bots, the code, might not be illegal, but the activity the bot engages in could be illegal.
There's such a spectrum of what these bots are doing, right? At Akamai, we see roughly a third to a half of all the traffic on the web is automation of some sort, so we see about a trillion hits a day from bots.
When we look at how inexpensive bots are, again, anywhere from $20 bucks up to $500, it seems like anyone could own and deploy a bot.