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| | Leeching, Link Access Control and LinkDeny Leeching. Inline linking. Hotlinking. Bandwidth theft. Sometimes, it is even called direct linking or confused with deep linking. Whatever the term, if a third party site is requesting your files and presenting them within their Web site experience, the reality is that you are paying for the bandwidth that they are falsely representing to their users as their own site content. Essentially, it is their HTML, but you are serving the images, video, FLASH, game or other files and bandwidth that makes the page work. Hey, stop stealing my bandwidth! In the classic example of content leeching, an eBay ad is created with an unauthorized image link served from a manufacturer’s site for eBay product listing… that’s good for the eBay user selling something, but bad for the original manufacturer’s bandwidth bill as they serve an image but get no benefit from the transfer. That’s also called stealing, and while there are no current laws to protect from this type of abuse, LinkDeny for IIS is the transparent security solution to stop such bandwidth pirates dead in their tracks. Anti-leeching is itself a subset of the larger Internet challenge of access control. We all have sections of our site – or a Web-based application – that we would rather not share with the whole world. Paid content that users must purchase first, proprietary or copyrighted material, sensitive, personal or private data, commercial software code, affiliate link landing and jump pages, downloads, you name it – once any “special” content is hosted on your Web site, it is open and readily available to anyone who can determine the URL. Stop guessing who sees what on your site and add a crucial layer of access control to HTTP and HTTPS with LinkDeny. LinkDeny will become your access control Swiss army knife for IIS. Notice a bunch of penetration attempts from a particular IP address or country? Block ‘em. Can’t control every link to your site placed into a user forum, blog post, community site like SlashDot.com or a social networking site like MySpace.com? Limit traffic spikes from these sites that may cause a denial of service state on your Web site with LinkDeny. Can’t control the browser a user surfs with but may have built your site to work with only particular browsers? Use LinkDeny to control the types of browsers that access your site to insure the best end user experience. What about comment spammers on your blog, forum or board, soliciting for sales in your comments? Zap them by denying their IP address access to your site. The applications are endless, and LinkDeny gets stronger as you add more rules to control who or what gets to your unique site. With a flexible rules framework implemented as an ISAPI filter, LinkDeny lets you allow or deny requests based on the referring site, the user-agent or Web browser type, the IP address (specific addresses, ranges or countries by IP address block), on the HTTP headers present in request, or by time period (URLs that expire after a certain time period). Detailed logging and testing interfaces allow you make sure that you are not blocking good traffic, and rules can be remotely uploaded to the IIS Web server for LinkDeny in XML format. Have you looked at your Web server logs lately? Who is stealing your bandwidth? Who is accessing your most secured files? Want more layers of risk mitigation and security to keep the lawyers and insurers off your back? Secure your Microsoft IIS Web server with LinkDeny today! | | 
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| | LinkDenying in the Real World This topic is nothing new to Web administrators, and there are a variety of custom code snippets and products out there with various feature sets. Here are series of blog posts and articles on the topic for your review and research: Fuddruckers Hotlinks a FLASH Game http://dirigibles.livejournal.com/75781.html NY Times Uses Geo-Targeting to Block Article From UK Users http://www.adotas.com/2006/08/ny-times-uses-geo-targeting-to-block-article-from-uk-users/ Internet links pose image and legal problems http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/sec/2005/1219sec1.html If the context isn't a Web page, can you legally hyperlink? http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3231 Major Newspapers Hotlink Images from Unsuspecting Companies; Drain Bandwidth and Server Resources Without Permission http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2006/05/exclusive_major.html Bloggers Cautioned About Being Copy Cats http://www.ecommercetimes.com/rsstory/45032.html The MySpace Age (see comments for “hotlink” woes): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4782118.stm How to Get Bloggers to Evangelize Your Product http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?ident=29689 Outwit Bandwidth Thieves http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol5/beginner_no15.htm Hotlinking: It's obviously legit, right? (wrong.) http://www.themediadrop.com/archives/000932.php Images, Hotlinking and Bandwidth http://www.blogd.com/archives/001368.html Protect your site's content http://www.urban75.org/tech/protect.html | | |
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