Hotlinking and Bandwidth Theft

The internet is going at a pretty fast pace. We can also find bloggers, webmasters and website developers among ourselves these days. This is an important reason for me to write this post. Before proceeding let me give a small introduction about what actually I have posted here.

Introduction

Bandwidth theft does not mean cracking some gullible broadband user’s internet account and there by using it for your own benefits. So those who came here with evil expectations, “Sorry”. Through this post I talk about the consequences of using images hosted on other servers in your own blog or websites. Also a short paragraph about what would happen if images hosted on your own server are used by other fellow bloggers.

The Incident

I will first speak about my own experience as a blogger. I posted a post about the website Bug Me Not in my blog. I also added a Bug Me Not website logo image so that it would be helpful to visitors. I had to take the image from some other source because I could not use the ‘image’ in the actual website.

The blog readers responded with lukewarm response to that post. I later forgot about it, because I continued to get decent traffic on my other posts. But suddenly one day I noticed increased visitor count on the post regarding Bug Me Not website. I also noticed something unusual. Most of the visitors were from search engine result, and the search word was “gay sex“.

I wondered how, because I had not blogged anything involving porn in my blogs. I feared if some cracker had laid hands on my blog. I visited the post and to my horror found the photo of a gay group sex in place of the Bug Me Not logo. To prevent further damage to my blog’s reputation, I quickly logged in and deleted the image.

So What Happened? Was I Hacked?

In fact, no, I wasn’t. What just happened was the consequence of hotlinking. Since the URL of the photo pointed to someother server, hence that server’s owner had the full freedom to replace the Bug Me Not website logo with that pornography image! That’s it and whoever had used the logo from that server had their images replaced.

Since then my posts carry minimal of images and even if it carries then the images point to a storage space owned by me. I now use the free 1 GB space in Picasa and 3GB space in wordpress itself for my images, irrespective of it being available on the internet or on my computer.

So hotlinking can be dangerous and can leave you embarrased. Be careful while linking images stored somewhere on the internet.

What about Bandwidth Theft

Now interpret the incident from the perspective of the server owner. I was stealing his bandwidth. How? Everytime a user visits my post, the image is downloaded to his computer from someone’s server. It costs him to host space on the internet. If traffic is heavy on mine, and the maximum bandwidth of the server is used up, then the owner can’t use his server for his own purpose! And I am making him/her pay for the visitors visiting my post. He is spending for nothing in return. And I had not asked any permission to use his/her image in my post!

So he/she changed the image to gay group sex image and let me learn the hard way.

How to Detect and Prevent Bandwidth Theft?

That shall be answered in the my next post, as this post has become already long. Play safe!

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