“I’m not a robot.” This assertion to the familiar CAPTCHAquestion is increasingly not a simple click as bot traffic is reported to have surpassed human web surfers. But parsing out the intentions of bots can be tricky.

A new report from edge cloud platform Fastly traces the new landscape of bots online based on research conducted in Q2 of this year.

• Most bots (87%) are considered malicious; they pose threats like account takeover attacks and ad fraud.
• A small but growing slice, however, now scrapes data for AI training, crawls sites for AI search indexing, and pulls information in real-time for user queries to AI chatbots.

This rise in bot traffic can strain web infrastructure and create new challenges for businesses concerned with protecting or promoting web content and marketing materials.

“The challenge for website owners often is in letting the good bots in while keeping the bad ones out,” the authors wrote.

Find out how website owners are addressing the jams.—PK

If the analysts are right, your work desktop could soon be streaming to you from a far-off data center. Bet they didn’t show that in The Jetsons.

According to new research by Gartner, desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) will become a primary workspace for 20% of employees by 2027, versus 10% in 2019. By then, Gartner also predicts DaaS will be cost-effective for 95% of employees, up from 40% in 2019.

Gartner defines DaaS as “the provision of virtual desktops by public cloud or other service providers.” The research firm listed Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Citrix, and Omnissa as current leaders in the DaaS provider market.

Control spending. While Gartner noted that DaaS is currently leveraged for a small subset of remote workers in most organizations, use cases for virtual desktops are multiplying, particularly when it comes to cost and operational and sustainability needs.

Learn more about how tech leaders are also heading up the DaaS market.—BM

Cyberattackers are a lot like a straight-A student—they love going to school. And their favorite subjects might be credential theft and phishing.

According to a report from cybersecurity company Check Point Software Technologies, the education field averaged 4,356 weekly cyberattacks from January through July 2025.

The 41% year over year increase in attacks makes education the most targeted of all global sectors, the cybersecurity company wrote in an August 28 blog post.

To defend against the crowded cafeteria of school cyber threats, Check Point recommended IT pros enforce multi-factor authentication, phishing awareness for staff and students, patching (especially email and collaboration platforms), and threat-prevention tools that block malicious emails and files.

What’s with all these cyberattacks? Read more here.—BH

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