U.S. leads global list of bot‑attack targets as AI‑driven threats surge

The United States has become ground zero for automated cyber attacks, according to new figures that show America attracts nearly three in five bot‑driven assaults worldwide.

A visualisation compiled by World Visualized ranks the most bot‑targeted nations and places the U.S. far ahead of any other country, with 59% of all bot traffic among total attacks.

The United Kingdom follows at 31 %, while Hong Kong and Indonesia are tied at 24%. Australia (18%), France (17%), Singapore and the United Arab Emirates (both 11%), and Brazil and India (both 9%) round out the list.

The country‑by‑country breakdown comes amid a broader surge in automated attacks. Imperva’s 2025 Bad Bot Report, the cybersecurity firm’s 12th annual study, found that automated traffic overtook human activity for the first time in a decade; bots made up more than half (51 %) of all internet traffic in 2024.

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The report attributes the shift to the rapid adoption of generative AI and large language models (LLMs), which simplify the creation and deployment of malicious bots.

Imperva’s researchers observed several worrying trends, including that Malicious bots account for 37 % of web traffic. Additionally, bad bot activity has risen for the sixth consecutive year, climbing from just over 30 % in 2023.

The finding also revealed that more than half (55%) of bot attacks were classified as advanced or moderate, meaning they use sophisticated techniques to mimic human behaviour and evade detection. Conversely, simple high‑volume attacks grew to 45% of all bot attacks, up from 40% in 2023.

With businesses increasingly reliant on application programming interfaces (APIs), 44% of advanced bots also traffic targeted APIs. Financial services, telecommunications, and computing/IT were the sectors most affected, with financial services alone accounting for 22 % of account‑takeover incidents.

The report also suggests that the number of account takeover (ATO) attacks rose 40% in the past year and 54% over three years, fuelled by AI‑driven credential‑stuffing and phishing campaigns and while tools like ByteSpider Bot, ClaudeBot and Google Gemini are reshaping how users interact with services, they are also being weaponised. ByteSpider Bot accounted for 54% of generative‑AI‑enabled attacks.

Imperva’s data set is vast. The company says the report draws on threat intelligence collected in 2024 from its global network, which blocked 13 trillion bad bot requests across thousands of domains and industries.