Hotlinking i0.wp.com Copyrighted Images by Spammers

Resolved kn999nk
(@kn999nk)

2 years, 9 months ago

Copyrighted Images cached on your system are being hotlinked and displayed by Spam sites like mentioned novocom.top. This site has images on loads of topics/keywords and all images displayed are from your server.

I do not use Jetpack (never had earlier either) yet, all images from my site are cached on your server.

1. Why are my images being cached on your servers?
2. Why is it so easy for anyone to simply add your link (i0.wp.com) in front of image link to easily bypass any hotlink protection.
3. Why is your system caching images from all types of sites and not just ones who are using Jetpack
4. Anybody is free to access image through your wp.com servers by only knowing the image url.
5. My copyrighted images like many others are freely being accessed/stolen by anyone through your servers and there is nothing I as the copyright owner can do about it.

Please advise what you can do about this as it is severely affecting my site results.

The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

Plugin Contributor Dan (a11n)
(@drawmyface)

2 years, 9 months ago

Hi there

Jetpack’s image CDN is a free, public CDN, which can serve all images from any site, not only those using Jetpack.

If you want to prevent people from caching your images using Jetpack’s image CDN, I’d suggest you block the “Photon/1.0” user agent at the server level, so the images can’t be accessed by the CDN.

Once that’s done, any cached images will eventually expire from the cache. You can also send us a list of URLs if you want us to remove any images manually.

Hope that helps!

Thread Starter kn999nk
(@kn999nk)

2 years, 9 months ago

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your quick response. The purpose behind caching of images is ok.
However, is there a way you can block or protect hotlinking to images from your cache.

The above mentioned site is hotlinking images from your cache on almost all topics and very much copyrighted image. There are many sites who are now using this method to publishing someone’s images by conveniently bypassing hotlink protection settings.

My hotlink protection does not prevent such websites from stealing my content because the images are not coming from my original domain

Plugin Contributor Dan (a11n)
(@drawmyface)

2 years, 9 months ago

Hi @kn999nk

As I mentioned, you can block the “Photon/1.0” user agent, and that will prevent your images from being cached by Jetpack.

This should help:
https://moz.com/blog/blocking-bots-based-on-useragent

kirstyprovan
(@kirstyprovan)

2 years, 6 months ago

Hi there,
Please remove the following link (which has been completely deleted from my site but is still appearing):

https://i0.wp.com/kirstyprovan.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/flamescanucks130209-940-8col.jpg?resize=500,349

Thank you!

Plugin Support Mehdi (a11n)
(@muffinpeace)

2 years, 6 months ago

Hey @kirstyprovan

I can see that the image isn’t appearing there, so it was already deleted from our CDN!

If you ever wish to delete any images you have on our CDN, please reach out to us privately here and we’ll take care of those for you.

Best,

kirstyprovan
(@kirstyprovan)

2 years, 6 months ago

Thank you! The link is still showing up for me when I click on it- I checked it on my cell phone to make sure it isn’t a cache issue. Please ensure it’s actually been deleted on your end!