Hotlinking is the practice of directly linking to images on a website and embedding them in another website. It has legitimate uses but is frequently used as a dastardly means of stealing both images and bandwidth.
I use Cloudflare hotlink protection, but had not checked the analytics for a very long time. I thought the practice of hotlinking was fading away – bandwidth being no longer so dear. Nope. I was amazed to find 4,752 blocked hotlink attempts in the last 30 days – an average of 158 each day – on just one of my sites.
Hotlinking can also be prevented using htaccess or cPanel, but using Cloudflare keeps the nefarious requests and associated processing completely off my site.
