[Forum] Our private forums are displayed in another blog!

[ceho]

Hi, I am currently at work so there is not much I can do really (our webwasher is blocking almost everything but vbulletin.com ;-)), but that story is so weird that I'd like to ask about it here.

My forum www.cureconnections.com of course has private forums. Some of them are for live audience recording downloads. We are used to other sites stealing our links or content manually. But today I received this linkback: http://thecuremusicboot.blogspot.com...2ffla.html?m=1 and that blog displays a big part of our private forums. Unfortunately I cannot access anything at work and on my iPhone it's not displayed very well. So one of my super moderators banned that member and sent me the source code of that blog. My first idea was that it was an iFrame and that member would just display our forum as logged in (which would be a massive security issue as pretty much anybody could access our members information or upload stuff etc.). But it's not an iFrame as you might see if you check on that blog.

The weird thing is that my site is completely in English, but here it's displayed in French. Are there any site translators?

As said, I am at work and can't do much, we have banned that member of course. But can anybody tell me what's going on? How did he do that? And how can I avoid such things in the future? I am running on 4.1.11 and I took care of all security measures that are available at vB. I am very worried about this incident. Thanks for any help or tips or ideas.

[Lynne]

I have no idea how they did that. That is very, very odd.

Are threads updating on the blog at all with new replies/views and last post times?

[ceho]

Looks like they don't update. However, when you click on one of the links and you are logged into my forum you'll get forwarded to the according thread you clicked on in that blog. If you're not logged you get to the log in page and then to the thread.

I really want to stop that. How's all that possible ?

[Lynne]

Yes, I did notice that all the links are to your site. Why someone would want to do that, I don't know.

Could they have just viewed your page source and copy/pasted the html?

[whitey10tc]

Report it http://support.google.com/blogger/bi..._type=main_tos, you may need to provide blogger with a login to your forum so they can see it is your content.
As for how they did it, most likely from the page source.

[ceho]

Thanks whitey10c, I will do that.

How weird is that? What do people think? No respect out there, just grabbing and stealing where ever and what ever possible... I just wish I could handle that my way...

[wdkvb]

Well, it's pretty straight-forward..

Take a look of the sourcecode...

<img alt="1 Attachment (s)" border="0" src="http://ccc.cureconnections.netdna-cdn.com/images/Future/misc/paperclip.png" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px;" title="1 Attachment (s)" /></a></div>

It's a hotlinking-site - and those guys are stealing bandwidth from your server.

To prevent this - setup a htaccess-file on your server-root containing this...

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?cureconnection.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|css|js)$ http://i.imgur.com/qX4w7.gif [NC,R,L]

Also place an HTACCESS on your CDN-server containing

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?ccc.cureconnections.netdna-cdn.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?cureconnection.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|css|js)$ http://i.imgur.com/qX4w7.gif [NC,R,L]

In short terms all it does, is block every site hotlinking to your content (that being filetypes like css, jpg, gif and so on...) and serving users who is NOT visiting YOUR site -> http://i.imgur.com/qX4w7.gif

Happy coding

[ceho]

Excellent, thanks a lot!! Cannot wait to get home from work to do that and stop that ***********

[ceho]

By the way, that blog has been closed by blogspot an hour after we reported it to Google. So thanks again for your help.