In online environments like social networking sites, ecommerce sites, and content publishing sites, fraud and other malicious behavior can cause significant problems. While most malicious behavior is unlikely to cause service disruptions or take down a website, some malicious behavior can slow the website by consuming more resources than a typical user of the website. Examples of malicious behavior includes spamming, data scraping, setting up bad accounts, and committing payment fraud. Malicious behavior can be detected in a number of ways, including by monitoring certain calls or actions initiated by users.
Particular types of malicious behavior can be detected by the particular calls made, by the number of calls made, or by data or metadata of the calls. As such, entities that host online environments may use various tools to track certain calls according to one or more characteristics of the calls. The entities can use the data obtained by the tools to analyze traffic or actions of one or more particular users to identify malicious behavior. When malicious behavior is detected, the entity can stop the behavior, mitigate damage caused by the behavior, or take another action in response to the behavior.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.