Businesses Seen Doubling Down on Web Data Gathering, Impacting Cybersecurity Efforts, in First Quarter 2021
Protecting internal data and collecting external data became the focus of internet-based businesses, according to Oxylabs findings.
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Oxylabs, a proxy service provider, found significant growth in public web data-gathering activities in internet-specific industries when comparing the first quarters of 2020 and 2021. Overall year-over-year growth exceeded 70 percent in some months of the first quarter with other months having more modest surges of 30-50 percent.
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 gigabytes) increased in some areas by more than 100 percent when utilizing Oxylabs’ proxy networks. Other cybersecurity business cases experienced more modest growth of 40 percent.
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.
Oxylabs also reports that public web data gathering activities in ecommerce segments experienced significant growth as well. Although the ecommerce sector boomed, businesses began realizing the power of online retail. Thus, traffic usage increased by nearly 60 percent for data that is sensitive to geolocation changes (e.g., product and service prices).
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. “Alternative data available on the Internet rose exponentially while everyone was working from home,” an Oxylabs spokesperson stated. “More data means accurate and less risky predictions -- something that may seem almost too good to be true for investment companies.”
Based on Oxylabs predictions from the data, the importance of cybersecurity rose in tandem with the growth of online activity. The company predicted both cybersecurity and ecommerce will continue to rise, even as the world returns to post-pandemic life.
For details, visit https://oxylabs.io.