Attributor Hogs Your Bandwidth for The Man

Fresh from the TekTalk site comes the news why you should stick the deny statement on the attributor.com website attacks.

Attributor acts like a super sleuth for the rich and famous along with those who hold vast copyrights. At least enough to pay their fees. For the fees they charge their clients they claim to rob billions of websites of billions of gigabytes in bandwidth to check and see if they have a word, picture or insight that might be claimed by the client.

Like Tektalk, we found the attributor.com IP hacking our site and in less than 10 minutes had sucked over 25gig in data. Watching the logs these hacks at Attributor suck your site over and over looking at every link to everything over and over again. We know of one video script site that has a search to youtube that got hit for 60 gig and they only had links to Youtube videos. The Attributor spider went nuts and his account was closed.

Now attributor may seem nice but they are taking money from people to rape your bandwidth without cause. Not only that, as a law unto themselves, they do this with no authority, without your permission and without recompense for their rape. Perhaps you think rape is a bit to harsh? If the freaks at Attributor would use a spider and abide by robots.txt they might not do the damage they do. But since they want to see what browsers see they must come into your site like humans, faking you. Robots do not look at videos and graphics and Attributor wants to see everything.

While a tax or fine should be put on Attributor for their brutal assaults on websites we think that you should be aware how to get them out.

Since they do not abide by robots.txt you must deny them in the .htaccess. This can only work if we are all vigilant to changes they will make in this IP due to exposure. We will be watching all our log files to let you know any more we find. Please do the same. Put this line at the top of your .htaccess file at root level

#attributor
deny from 64.41.145.177

How?

Just keep checking your log files for the IP's that download huge amounts of pages and data with the least amount of visits. Look at your logs and see any spikes in activity for a day or two. Get the IP numbers of these offenders and let us know. We can even check and help identify who is hitting you so hard. We all want to know really.

We found this info at Tek Talk