Leeches are worms that predominantly suck blood and feed on blood
from vertebrate and invertebrate animals. Historically, leeches were
widely used for medical purposes in Greece and India to remove blood
from patients. Modernly, in the internet world however, web
administrators and website owners associate leeches with more subtle
ends, rather than the sucking of blood, merely the sucking of computing
resources. This historical association is modernly used to associate
users across the internet who use resources on a network without paying
for them or giving anything back to the network.
On a torrent
network a leecher is someone who downloads files without adequately
contributing to the network, in a meaningful way - typically by
disconnecting from the network as soon as he/she has completely
downloaded the file. On other networks, a leecher is someone who
benefits from the network or gathers information from the network and
offers nothing in return. In economic terms, such users are called free
riders. For example, a member of a labor union who does not pay any dues
but benefits from the efforts of the union.
As a website owner,
you should be concerned about leechers using your resources such as disk
space, bandwidth and other computing resources such as processing power
or memory. This may occur when users that are authorized by you to use
the website use it in a manner that is not authorized or intended by
you. For example, a university may offer its students a cloud storage
space for educational purposes, and some students may maliciously use
such storage space to store movies or mp3 files, which is not
necessarily illegal or wrong - but is not the intended use of the
resource offered to the students.
This may also occur in a small
or medium business, where employees are offered storage space on the
network to store the data they need, so that they can access it from
multiple locations through the internet - but the employees may end up
using the storage space for completely unrelated purposes, such as to
store personal information and files. Users may also end up sharing the
login information with other people and allow them to use those
resources for unintended uses.
As a website owner, depending on
whether your resources are scarce and based on the cost benefit of
having such leechers, you may want to terminate such leechers. The next
obvious question that arises is, how you would identify such leechers,
and how you would terminate them. Obviously it is not feasible to
individually eliminate each user and verify each user, but there ought
to be a system to identify usage patterns and alert you when there is a
risk of leechers being on your network.
Many popular web hosting
interface providers offer leech protection, and it is widely used in the
industry to prevent leeching activity. Mr. Ruzbeh Raja a web
administrator at a popular web hosting company said that "Preventing
leechers is a priority for many website owners and, indeed widely used
by our clients to prevent waste of resources". Mr. Raja further said
that users being offered an unlimited web hosting plan in particular
should be concerned about leechers given that they do not have a
particular set limit of the resources they can use, he said that this
would cause them to run the risk of being caught as abusing their
account as a whole.
By
Shaunak Sayta
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