Barracuda's security analysis highlights the emergence of 'gray bots,' a category of web bots that exist between helpful and harmful. These bots, including web scrapers and generative AI scraper bots, can generate substantial traffic to web applications without overt malicious intent. Senior software engineer Rahul Gupta noted specific examples like ClaudeBot as highly active gray bots, contributing to millions of requests daily that can disrupt normal web operations. This unexpected, aggressive bot traffic requires organizations to integrate considerations for gray bots into their security frameworks.
Gray bots are blurring the boundaries of legitimate activity. They are not overtly malicious, but their approach can be questionable. Some are highly aggressive.
ClaudeBot is the most active Gen AI gray bot in our dataset by a considerable margin. ClaudeBot's relentless requests are likely to impact many of its targeted web applications.
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