topic Preventing Hotlinking in Blog, Website & Page Publishing

Preventing Hotlinking

SCoppini — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 13:22:40 GMT

Hi everyone,

I have a website on hubspot and a problem with hotlinking.

I've found this post: https://blog.hubspot.com/website/hotlinking

But I guess it is generic and not specific for Hubspot because I do not understand how to apply those solutions.

I'd like to implement first two points:

Use a CDN with hotlink protection:
I know Hubspot use Cloudfare CDN, but how can I enable the hotlink protection? It seems it is not enabled by default;
Add code to your .htaccess file:
What I've understood is that I cannot use htaccess file in Hubspot. Any idea how can I bypass this problem or how can I implement an URL rewrite in Hubspot?

Thank you

Re: Preventing Hotlinking

TomM2 — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 14:31:53 GMT

Hey @SCoppini you're right in that, as a managed solution HubSpot will not allow you to access server files, such as .htaccess. This is very common practice on any managed CMS solution as you both likely have a shared server and editing the .htaccess file could potentially entirely break the system.

Unfortunately hotlinking is just something that will inevitably happen when you have a website though, once it's online it's online for the world to access. So if you upload an image or doc to your website it's fair to expect it may potentially be linked to from somewhere else. The first thing I would do is ensure you're using your own domain for the HubSpot file manager.

I would be curious to get confirmation from Hubspot though, @MiaSrebrnjak can you confirm if HubSpot has hotlink protection enabled in customer's cloudflare instances as outlined in the HS blog here?

Re: Preventing Hotlinking

SCoppini — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 15:44:00 GMT

Hi Tom,

thank for your reply.
I image I cannot totally avoid hotlinking, but I'd like to mitigate the problem. Is there any practice I can apply on hubspot?

That ones explained in the hubspot blog look like inapplicable.

Thank you

Re: Preventing Hotlinking

TomM2 — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 15:09:10 GMT

Hey @SCoppini the only thing really available would be to ensure that the images in your file manager are set to be non indexable. Outside of that there's no real other options!

Re: Preventing Hotlinking

MiaSrebrnjak — Fri, 31 May 2024 15:59:28 GMT

Chiming in here (apologies for the late reply @TomM2!)

I can confirm that we currently do not provide more advanced options to prevent hotlinking, except the ability to test the X-Frame-Options which might be helpful.

Thank you for your understanding,

Mia, Community team