Advanced Access Controls for IIS Web Servers Prevent Hotlinking and Bandwidth Theft

Control access to your Web site content; ensure your bandwidth is available only to your users. The flexible, rules-based system allows you to use a wide variety of criteria to deny access to content resources, making LinkDeny a powerful security tool for Microsoft IIS Web site administrators.

An XML-formatted rules engine makes integration of LinkDeny into existing site backends and content management systems hassle-free. Detailed logging and a built-in testing interface ensure you don't block good traffic.

• Control access to proprietary, paid, or copyrighted files
• Help reduce affiliate fraud by ensuring legitimate referrals
• Block country-level and targeted site attacks with linkDeny's GeoIP database
• Control user experience by redirecting dead links for better SEO management
• Fully understand your leeching and access problems with intelligent logging

Pricing

Related Information

• About Access Controls and LinkDeny
• Wikipedia Definition of Inline Linking (Hotlinking)
• LinkDeny Evaluation Guide

Features

• LinkDeny's powerful access controls can block downloads of your content based on requestor's:
  • IP address
  • Referring URL
  • Country or geographic location
  • Length of user session
  • Type of Web browser
  • Existence of cookie
  • HTTP request header type and content

Rules-based System

Rules-based system for transparently controlling site access over any HTTP/HTTPS connection to a Microsoft IIS Web server:

• Allow or Deny access to specific URL paths or MIME types of files (wildcards and regular expressions supported) requested by a browser or proxy server based on pre-configured criteria:
  • By Referer URL, domain or host name (the URL from which a request is made)
  • By User-agent type (browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox (Mozilla/5.0), search engine robots like Googlebot, etc.)
  • By IP address (by single IP address, a range of IP addresses or the IP addresses of specific countries by a geographic IP address database integrated from Port80 Software partner MaxMind - learn more about included 97% accurate database or optional 99% accurate database upgrade)
  • By HTTP request headers standards conformance (the presence of specific text in request headers)
  • By user session (allowed time for URL access, managed by URL or cookie flag and mask)
• Full control of LinkDeny site requests and responses, including:
  • Log and take no action (by default on installation)
  • Redirect request to a specific URL on your site or any site
  • Replace response with a particular file (image, HTML, etc.)
  • Replace response with 404 HTTP server error message

XML-based Rule Templates

XML-based Rule Templates provide ready-to-deploy anti-leeching and access control rules; dozens of access control templates provided, including

• Templates to Allow or Deny a request based on geographic IP data:
  • Any specific country
  • More than two dozen continental and regional rule templates (North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, etc.)
  • Rule templates by demographic information:
    • Top Countries with Most Internet Users
    • Top Countries with Longest Surfing Internet Users
    • Top Countries with High Risk for Hacking or Fraud
    • Top Countries with High Risk for Phishing Attacks
    • English Speaking Countries
  • Miscellaneous country affiliation rule templates:
    • European Union (EU)
    • World Trade Organization (WTO) Countries
    • U.S. Embargoed Countries
• Templates to Allow or Deny a request based on the request's referring site:
  • Content Leeching Sites rule templates:
    • Top Blog Hosts (Blogspot, LiveJournal, etc.)
    • Top Social Networking Sites (MySpace, etc.)
    • Top Auction Sites (eBay, etc.)
    • Top Anonymous Surfing Sites (Proxify, The-Cloak, etc.)
  • Other Major Internet Sites rule templates:
    • Top Search Engines (Google, Yahoo!, etc.)
    • Top News Sites - General (NYTimes, Slate etc.)
    • Top News Sites - Local and TV (NYPost, Telemundo, etc.)
    • Top News Sites - Financial (SmartMoney, Bloomberg, etc.)
    • Top News Sites - Tech (Slashdot, InfoWorld, etc.)
    • Top Internet Portals (MSN, Amazon, etc.)
• Templates to Allow or Deny a request based on best practice security policies:
  • Allow common Web browsers only rule template
  • Deny images or video without user-agent header present rule template
  • Deny image or video without referrer present rule template

Full logging functionality intercepted requests and LinkDeny actions

• Transparent logging only mode (by default)
• Logs available in text files for review

LinkDeny rule testing utility

LinkDeny rule testing utility to validate rules and insure proper anti-leeching and access control rules

Import/export settings

Import/export settings for migration and server-farm deployments

Multiple management interface options

• Easy to use GUI management interface
• Direct XML rule file editing

No server bounce required

• No restart on install
• No service interrupt on settings change

Supports servers and web farms

Supports single IIS Web server or IIS Web farms

Implementation

Implemented as super-fast ISAPI filter

Compatible with multiple server environments

Compatible with ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, PHP and most JSP application server environments

• Simple to install/uninstall

System Requirements

• OS: Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 2 or Server 2000 with SP4
• Hardware: x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit)
• Note: IIS 7 / Windows Server 2008 not yet supported (sign up for the IIS 7 Beta Alert)

The following runtimes are also required but can be installed by the LinkDeny installer if not already present on the target system:

• .Net 2.0 (or higher)
• Download the x86 (32-bit) version.
• Download the x64 (64-bit) version.
• Visual C++ 2005 SP1
• Download the x86 (32-bit) version.
• Download the x64 (64-bit) version.