1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to verifying illegitimate non-human users that are accessing content.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the past few years, there has been a significant increase in the number of automated non-human user software, known as “bots”, browsing the internet. Some of these bots are used for legitimate purposes to analyze and classify content across the World Wide Web. For example, GOOGLE® uses bots to gather content to be indexed for their search services. However, some other types of bots are used for illegitimate and many times for fraudulent purposes. One such illegitimate usage is the artificial inflation of impression counts (number of times an advertisement is viewed) and/or impression clicks (number of times an advertisement is clicked) in order to fraudulently profit from getting paid based on those inflated numbers.
These bots are very difficult to identify because they may originate from a server farm or from regular user computers, computers that real and unsuspecting humans use to legitimately view web pages or other types of digital content. The bots can spread and infect a computer through malware, adware, malvertising, viruses, plugins, email attachments, apps, websites, or through any other means. Further, once potential bots are identified, it is important to verify that that the potential bot actually is a bot and hasn't been misidentified.
A need arises for effective techniques that can be used to verify illegitimate non-human users that are accessing content.