LinkDeny

Overview

Unscrupulous site owners may link to your content directly and literally steal your bandwidth. This theft is commonly called leeching, hotlinking, inline linking, or bandwidth theft, and such direct linking to your valuable image, video, binary files or other important site content is typically done without your knowledge, let alone your permission! Now, with LinkDeny, you can fight back and control access to your Web site or Web-based application content and to ensure that your bandwidth use is for your site users only -- keeping out all types of "bad" traffic.

LinkDeny's powerful access control features allow you to transparently stop bandwidth pirates and potential hackers in their tracks by limiting their access via a Web request's: 

• IP address
• Referring URL
• Country or geographic location
• Demographics
• Length of user session
• Type of Web browser
• Existence of cookie
• HTTP request header type and content

The flexible, rules-based system allows you to dream up just about any method to allow or deny access to content resources, making LinkDeny a powerful security tool for Microsoft IIS Web site administrators and management.

Whether you implement your own rules or use any of the dozens of predefined access templates, LinkDeny addresses all sorts of common site problems from simple security to traffic management. For example, LinkDeny technology has been successfully used to protect against country level and targeted site attacks, control references from troubling posts or Blog mentions (or any site), limit traffic overloads from social networking and other leeching site posts, minimize affiliate system fraud, and stop pesky users abusing comment and message board systems.

You'll be able to control your site traffic with confidence with LinkDeny. Detailed logging and a built-in testing interface insures that you don't block good traffic. An XML-formatted rules engine makes for easy integration of LinkDeny into existing site backends and content management systems. Implemented as a solid and fast ISAPI filter, LinkDeny will give you more control with very little performance impact. Get in control of your content and bandwidth access with LinkDeny today!

Features

• 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 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 to validate rules and insure proper anti-leeching and access control rules
• 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 single IIS Web server or IIS Web farms
• Implemented as super-fast ISAPI filter
• Compatible with ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, PHP and most JSP application server environments
• Simple to install/uninstall

Benefits

• Stop content leeching sites from stealing bandwidth by copying your file links and inline linking to your site or application's content
• Control access to sensitive, private, proprietary, paid, or copyrighted files and downloads
• Boost server availability and reducing serving costs
• Improve management of time-restricted content for paid sites
• Help reduce affiliate fraud by insuring legitimate referrals
• Avoid service interruptions from unplanned traffic surges by managing access for designated incoming links
• Control user experience by redirecting dead links for better SEO management
• Help protect against annoying users like blog comment spammers
• Fully understand your leeching and access problems with intelligent logging

Requirements

• IIS 6.0 / Windows Server 2003
• IIS 5.1 / Windows XP (not recommended for production servers)
• IIS 5 / Windows 2000
• IIS 4 / NT