Media Center
Press Release
July 14, 2001
Buellingen (Belgium)
IP blocker: the heavy duty snoop, spam and fraud protector
Belgian based webmasters' software developers fantomaster.com have announced the release of their latest product: fantomas multiBlocker™, a server based Perl/CGI program serving as a snoop, spam and fraud protector by enabling webmasters to block predefined Hosts, IPs, and UserAgents from accessing their sites.
Following up on the great success of our freeware fantomas blockFrog™ program in 1999, which enjoyed well over 3000 downloads, we decided to develop a professional version to offer expanded security and user comfort. This program, too, helps protect web sites from code nappers and content snoops with their aggressive, bandwidth consuming spiders. It effectively counters established privacy invaders, spammers, extractor bots and even credit card fraudsters.
“Moreover, it constitutes a safeguard against unwarranted, frivolous litigation centered around alleged infringements of trademarks, copyrights and patents,” says Marketing Manager
Ralph Tegtmeier, an internet entrepreneur of eight years' standing. “With competition on the web becoming fiercer by the day, there's a lot of people out there after your hide. They will check, among other things, whether your site is infringing trade marks and violating copyright, and so on. More often than not, their snoop bots are quite aggressive, deep crawling (and presumably caching) your site without your permission, ignoring the robots.txt convention, etc. ”
It is for cases like these that we devised fantomas multiBlocker™, the spider trap. We were not particularly amused by this sort of activity, even though we have nothing to hide. This program helps webmasters regain control over who may access their site. The attacking IP's spider is neatly put to sleep without draining local CPU resources or creating bandwidth loads beyond a few hundred bytes for the whole operation.
“Legitimate pursuit of copyright infringements and trademark piracy etc. is one thing,” Tegtmeier goes on to explain, “but violation of privacy and provocation of unwarranted, frivolous litigation because of mere greediness is another.”
“If you've got serious money to lose, or if you only give that impression, it's a fairly safe bet that some shark will try to get at it sooner or later. This may very well concern webmasters' clients as well. Seeing that people have been (and are being) sued for a mere link on their site in some more restrictive and punitive jurisdictions, this issue should not be trivialized. As a webmaster, if you simply so much as mention Microsoft Windows or Dell or what have you on your site, you run a very realistic risk of being sued to extinction these days.”
Ralph adds: “Then there's email extractors or harvesters: they will blithely crawl your site for any available email address you may feature on your pages, ignoring the Robots Text Exclusion Standard (robots.txt). The result: your address(es) will be sold to email marketers, flooding your mail box with tons and tons of spam mail — it may literally take years to get off those lists again!”
“Credit card fraud is another major issue confronting ecommerce focused web sites. The rate of fraudulent credit card chargebacks is truly worrisome. If you're getting lots of fishy online orders originating from foreign web hosts, you will find with your bank charging an arm and a leg for chargebacks and you, as an honest web vendor, will typically be absolutely helpless against these frauds. You may even lose your online merchant account that way, not an endearing prospect at all!”
“Now, webmasters can start making money again instead of chasing those evasive crooks — simply blocking them by Top Level Domain once and for all.”
Finally, the program serves as a heavy duty protector against rampant spiders. “Badly programmed, misbehaved spiders,” Tegtmeier explains, “namely whackers, some search bots, and very many others, tend to run rampant on web sites, getting lost in logical loops and issuing dozens if not hundreds of identical page requests. That way, they may easily wreak havoc to the point of crashing whole systems. This can cost any webmaster dearly: the time, labor, bandwidth and system resources wasted may be daunting. Thinking of sueing the instigators for damages? Good luck, you're sure going to need it! While weight of proof may not be such a big deal, provided server access logs are easily available, trying to get hold of someone hiding behind an overseas provider address is well nigh impossible and will, at the very least, prove exorbitantly costly.”
From now on, webmasters can easily block all foreign domains with a more than statistical average track record of credit card and chargeback fraud.
fantomaster.com — Director Ralph Tegtmeier
“While we are located in a Western European business environment — this being the German speaking part of Eastern Belgium, our initial efforts in positioning our products and services on the internet are focused on the international, English speaking market. Consequently, all our products are available in both English and German versions.”
“What's more, our prime priority is user friendliness. The internet has lived through some dramatic changes in recent years. One phenomenon being the arrival of the mainstream webmaster. The days of ultra tech savvy geeks are drawing to an end, and so actually is web masters' patience: in an ever more competitive environment, software solutions must be genuine time savers.”
“Nobody is interested in tweaking and fiddling with exotic, hard to understand solutions. Installation must be zappy, and so must day to day handling and maintenance. This is what we strive achieve with our clear and simple user interfaces, making installation and administration of our program a breeze even for the less experienced webmaster.”
Beyond their software products palette, fantomaster.com also offer search engine positioning consultation services and feature what is probably the world's most comprehensive search engine spiders database, a subscription service marketed as fantomas spiderSpy™
They also feature fantomTech™ ” their OEM Licensing program available at http://fantomtech.com.
Finally, their recently established fantomCrew™ affiliate program can be reviewed at http://fantomcrew.com.
More info:
Info
fantomNews
fantomProducts
fantomTips
fantomServices
fantomFree
fantomOrders
fantomAffiliates
fantomOEM
fantomMedia
Contact our Press & Media Department here:
Special Deal
The all-powerful 100% automatic Shadow Domain™ generator for effective heavy duty industrial-strength cloaking.
This beauty generates 100% relevant and unique content for your Shadow Domains™, creating an unlimited number of highly optimized unique pages including site maps in fully customizable keyword density and page weight
Then submit them to the search engines and redirect search engine generated human traffic in realtime (i.e. without delay) by search phrase to any URL you wish
Read More …