A very popular website has begun using my Flickrshow javascript slideshow, but failed to notify me beforehand, and so is using a version that downloads the images used from my server. This is resulting in my server being inundated with 100+ requests per second for these images, and crashing or slowing the server to the point that it times out. Its also eating a load of bandwidth.I am running a VPS using Ubuntu from Rackspace cloud, and have access to IPTables and/or Ubuntu Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW), but need to block by referrer since I can't tell what the IPs requesting the image will be. I don't want to let the request get as far as Apache as that is already affecting performance. Is it possible to block with a firewall or is there a better way? Something like ...-A INPUT -m string --string Referrer: http://www.rockinrio.com.br --algo bm --to 65535 -j DROP... was recommended but I can't get it to work, but then normally I use UFW.
How to preventing massive hotlinking of images before Apache?
hotlinking