How do we stop spammers stealing bandwidth?

[bizart]

We are looking for a way to stop spammers from stealing our bandwidth at www.bizart.com, which has been offering free public domain clipart for over five years now.

What the spammers are doing is linking to our images when they send out an e-mail spam message. When we find out, we change the name of the image directory, but by that time the damage is already done. In January alone, the damage was nearly $100 in extra bandwidth charges.

Is there a way we can prevent such outside linking, perhaps by an ingenious .htaccess file?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[SBGlasby]

there are many scripts to protect your bandwidth ...

bandwidth bob has been around for years.... instead of displaying the location of the image.... it runs everything through a cgi-script... which will only allow certain " you determine"... which domains can call the images...

a good place to start is : http://www.hotscripts.com/Perl/Scripts_and_Programs/Security_Systems/

have fun

[Ddr]

I do sympathize.

What you might do before you enable a protection script is change a couple of images that you know are being hotlinked to something ugly for general spam distribution. I dont know, instead of an image of a waving flag, how about a little text saying the mail spammers are stealing from you, and are about to be sued for it.

Turnaround is fair play

Dale