Security Issue

[steve421]

I hope this is in the right section.

i run a few high school athletic sites and just over the past few months they have been going over there bandwidth, they use a mp3 file and after some research i found out that that file is being downloaded thousands of times from foreign sites, almost all from China. Is there anything i can do to stop this, besides removing the audio file? Is there a way to only allow the audio file to be played if its called by some specific code?

[oracleguy]

The same principles people use the block image hotlinking could be used to block direct access to your mp3 file. Is this file played from some player on the website?

I haven't tried the output of this tool but it looks like it should work: http://www.htaccesstools.com/hotlink-protection/ Assuming you are on an Apache host. Just use mp3 as the extension instead of the defaults they have in there.

[VIPStephan]

Also, there is a site with a lot of stupid htaccess tricks including some security improvements. Additionally to hotlink protection you can establish password protection so in case anybody is accessing the file right from your domain you can ask for password.