The 2020 Bot Landscape and Impact Report by Kount has revealed that bots are more widespread than expected, and 88% of companies find existing bot protection tools largely ineffective.

In working with an independent research firm, Kount surveyed online retail and ecommerce business employees with full-time roles related to fraud prevention, customer experience, payments and management. The findings bring to light new insights into how businesses are using good bots, the breadth of the threat posed by different types of malicious bots and the state of bot mitigation and management.

Research highlights include the following:

• 81% of businesses often or very often deal with issues related to malicious bots; 
• more than half of businesses encountered more than 50 bot attacks in the last 12 months; 
• 80% say there has been an increase in financial loss within their organization because of more complex and sophisticated bot attacks; 
• one in four say a single bot attack has cost them USD 500,000 or more in the past year, and two in three say a single attack has cost USD 100,000 or more.