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Hijacked Graphics
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Figure 4. It is possible for another site
to invisibly include graphics from your
site in their pages. |
The graphics that you have on your site are something you have put effort
and time (and perhaps money) into developing to represent your business or
service. They are indicative of your brand or service and are a valuable part of
the consistent image your present to your customers. The way the Web works,
however, it is not very hard for another site to simply include a reference to
graphics from your site in their pages. The HTML img tag can tell a
visitor’s browser to retrieve graphics from anywhere else on the Web, as
illustrated in Figure 4, not just the same site the page is on. When this
happens, the visitors at the other site may have no idea that the graphics
belong to you. In Summary this behavior is referred to as ‘Graphics Hijacking’
and Summary has the Domains Hijacking Graphics
report to help you diagnose this behavior.
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Figure 5. The Domains Hijacking
Graphics report indicates which web
sites might be using your graphics. |
The Domains Hijacking Graphics report in Figure 5, shows you which domains
referred visitors who requested only graphics in their visit. This does
not necessarily mean that those domains are hijacking graphics, but it is a good
indication. If you have setup an agreement with partner web sites to allow them
to include references to your graphics in their site (for example, linking to
your logo to promote your product or linking to your advertisements to host on
their sites) Summary will not recognize this and these will show up in the
Domains Hijacking Graphics report.
Another entry that you will commonly find is ‘google.com’ (and
other Google sites.) Google (and some other search engines) have image search
tools. When Google users search for images they will get links to graphics on
your site but not the pages. Fortunately, Google lists the page that the image
is located on so visitors know where it came from.
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The Domains Hijacking Graphics report only shows you when other sites include
references to graphics on your site. If a malicious user really wants to steal
your graphics without you knowing she can simply save the image to her computer
and copy it to her web site. Saving an image produces the same request that
viewing it in the first place does (in fact web browsers just make a copy of the
image they have already cached, so you never get a request for the
‘save’ action if the image was already viewed.) This behavior is
effectively impossible to detect. However, if the user tries to copy all the
images (or a large number of images) from your site, then this can look
significantly like ‘mirroring’ behavior, which we will discuss in Lesson 12 - Investigating Troublemakers.
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Bad Referrers