A recent study by Incapsula, a cloud-based website security and performance service found that less than 50% of website traffic is actually real. With over 1000 websites inspected, the study found that 31% of the total website traffic is in fact potentially harmful traffic driven by bots and malicious software comes in an endless attempt to harm your website.

The most worrying part of this study is that this traffic is not even tracked by the analytics software which means that you will have to digg in to your website's logs to find out who or what is trying to harm your website.

As webmasters we usually focus on generating as much traffic as we can to our websites, whether we build it slowly by optimizing our website to search engines or buy it from other sources, never having to stop and think of the actual traffic we get in to our website.

In terms of security you must keep your website safe, know that in case your website gets hacked, your visitors will suffer and eventually you will suffer as search engines will report you as suspected malware and your website will be blocked. This will harm your business.

Some important tips that will help you keep safe:

1. Change your password from time to time.
2. Don't use weak passwords (such as qwerty, 123456 and so on)
3. Upgrade your software - Make sure your CMS and server software are up to date with the latest security pathes.
4. Run a periodical virus scan on your computer (that's where it all start from).

All these and more can help you protect yourself and your site from being hacked by the unwanted traffic to your site.