How to stop bandwidth theft?

I have a tube website and since a few days ago my bandwidth usage has doubled. The traffic and everything is same only the bandwidth has increased. I guess somebody is probably hot-linking my contents and getting my bandwidth.

My videos are on nginx servers and it create a session ID at end of video file and it expires after a 2-3 hours, If any one hotlink to the video file directly without the session ID they will get a 403 error.
So I think the bandwidth thief is using a method to by pass this.



What should I do to stop that? Is there any way to force videos only be playable under my domain name and I say goodbye to embedded videos?

Why dont you limit the access to your videos ( server that you host the videos on ) to only your OWN domain instead of using session ids, and block all else.

Or whitelist only the IP where your website is hosted ( if it is hosted on another server ).

If its theft in question it should solve your issue.

p.s With nginx this is easy to do, and there are plenty of tuts out there on how to do it.

In your nginx.conf, you may try to add this:

location ~ \.(mp4|flv|mkv)$ {
valid_referers none blocked mywebsite.com *.mywebsite.com;
if ($invalid_referer) {
return 403;
}
}


Or

location /path/video/folders/to/lock {
valid_referers none blocked mywebsite.com *.mywebsite.com;
if ($invalid_referer) {
return 403;
}
}

HostStage said:

In your nginx.conf, you may try to add this:

location ~ \.(mp4|flv|mkv)$ {
valid_referers none blocked mywebsite.com *.mywebsite.com;
if ($invalid_referer) {
return 403;
}
}


Or

location /path/video/folders/to/lock {
valid_referers none blocked mywebsite.com *.mywebsite.com;
if ($invalid_referer) {
return 403;
}
}

Click to expand...

What i would add is redirect invalid referers to :

virtualpurity said:

What i would add is redirect invalid referers to :

Click to expand...

Hahah! That's good.

You could also upload a video on youtube with your URL link in it to redirect the hot linked traffic to this video.
Bandwidth is free, and some of the stolen traffic, may actually come to your website.

The content belongs to you after all .

HostStage said:

In your nginx.conf, you may try to add this:

location ~ \.(mp4|flv|mkv)$ {
valid_referers none blocked mywebsite.com *.mywebsite.com;
if ($invalid_referer) {
return 403;
}
}


Or

location /path/video/folders/to/lock {
valid_referers none blocked mywebsite.com *.mywebsite.com;
if ($invalid_referer) {
return 403;
}
}

Click to expand...

Can bandwidth thief bypass this by using Kenplayer or a PHP script to get the links from my website for every request?

NX_NULL said:

Can bandwidth thief bypass this by using Kenplayer or a PHP script to get the links from my website for every request?

Click to expand...

With that method a "thief" would not be able to access your files because any outside access ( except from your domain ) will be blocked.
Spoofing referrers could work as an attack but you can always add your website IP to your server whitelist and block all others just to be 100% sure.

Bandwidth theft has many names: hot linking, remote linking, and it's most common name- direct linking. Direct linking is when you use a site's coding to display images on your site. This is done by viewing the source code and using the images' URLs. When people direct link, they are stealing bandwidth from the original image and/or site owner. There are many ways to help prevent direct linking of images on your site. You should follow those process to stop bandwidth theft.