Unfortunately, a web server is exposed to many attacks
targeting its bandwidth leading many times to a denial of service state on the
server.
Bandwidth leeching, also called hotlinking, is described by the
practice of hosting on a web server, web pages that contain unauthorized
content links, known as hotlinks, direct links, or remote links, to files
hosted by another site on another web server, in order to consume the bandwidth
of the latter server without having its pages viewed.
A usual case is when multiple pages (frequently hosted under
multiple websites to cause more damage) on the internet have links to a
website's images, cascading stylesheets, JavaScript files, etc... Whenever
these pages are visited, the uplink bandwidth of the targeted web server is
consumed. The more the external links to the targeted website's contents are,
the more its bandwidth is consumed. At a certain point, the bandwidth won't be
enough to serve new connections, it has been leeched!