Oxylabs findings show significant growth in public web data gathering activities in internet-specific industries when comparing Q1 of 2020 and Q1 of 2021. Overall year-over-year growth exceeded 70 per cent in some months of the first quarter with other months having more modest surges of 30-50 per cent.
Oxylabs’ clients involved in the cybersecurity industry recorded the biggest growth in activity in the first quarter of 2021. A tremendous year-over-year change is apparent as the traffic used (in GB) increased in some areas by over 100 per cent when utilising Oxylabs’ proxy networks. Other cybersecurity business cases experienced more modest growth of 40 per cent.
Breaking down these findings, the increases in data used means that cybersecurity companies were fighting back against the surge in phishing attacks, monitoring emails for any suspicious attachments or links, and performing anti-piracy activities more intensely than ever before.
Andrius Palionis, the VP enterprise solutions in Oxylabs, commented on the findings: “Back in 2020, when everyone was talking about how eCommerce will experience unprecedented growth due to the global pandemic, fewer comments were being made about cybersecurity.
“Cybersecurity’s immense growth is two-faceted. Of course, the primary reason is the mass exodus online. Many aspects of business had to be transformed and conducted over networks which meant new attack vectors for malicious actors.
“However, I think the mass movement online isn’t the only explanation – the composition of the people who migrated online is also important. Everyone has a preference and there were many people that might have preferred to conduct business offline. These users were now forced to conduct business online which introduced fewer knowledgeable tech-savvy users. And what could be a greater target for a hacker than that?”
Oxylabs also reports that public web data gathering activities in eCommerce segments experienced significant growth as well. While the eCommerce sector boomed, businesses began realising the power of online retail. Thus, traffic usage increased by nearly 60 per cent for data that is sensitive to geolocation changes (e.g. product and service prices).
“Of course, as eCommerce grows, so does public data collection.” Andrius continued: “As the lion’s share of profits move from retail stores, the possibility of collecting high-value data rises to uncover insights to bet on data-backed decisions. Even if some are still slacking in this aspect, businesses are being made aware of how data collection can drive profit growth.
Public data collected is used to unearth unique B2B and B2C intelligence insights. These may include competitor pricing information, remaining stock, amount of sales performed, product catalogues, consumer trends, etc.”
Finally, Oxylabs found that there is one complete outlier – the finance segment. For certain business cases, traffic used rose several times over when compared to the start of 2020. Andrius Palionis gave his analysis: “Alternative data available on the Internet rose exponentially while everyone was working from home. More data means accurate and less risky predictions – something that may seem almost too good to be true for investment companies.”
Andrius concluded: “As we can predict from the data, the importance of cybersecurity rose in tandem with the growth of online activity. I firmly believe that the importance of both cybersecurity and eCommerce will only continue to rise, even as the world returns back to the new normal.”
Share