BitTorrent and YouTube make up half of our encrypted Internet traffic

In recent years it has become apparent that BitTorrent users are increasingly searching for options to hide their download footprints. Thus far, however, there was little information available on how much of all encrypted traffic is file-sharing related. A new report published by Sandvine now provides some insight into this. To find out how much of all Internet traffic is encrypted, and what the most popular sources are, last month the company gathered data in collaboration with a North American fixed access network. The findings reveal that nearly 30% of all downstream traffic is encrypted. The majority of the traffic remains unencrypted (65%), and the small remainder has yet to be identified. Looking at the individual sources of encrypted traffic we see that YouTube currently accounts for most of it. More than 11% of all downstream traffic comes from encrypted YouTube data, which is nearly 40% of all encrypted traffic. BitTorrent transfers come in second place with 7.2% of the total downstream traffic, which is good for nearly a quarter of all encrypted data.