If You Sell Online, Protect Your Virtual Goods Properly

Back in 2007 I discovered by accident that virtual goods sold on the large digital marketplace Clickbank were not protected properly from unauthorized access (see Clickbank we have a problem). Five years later, I'm going to find out if Clickbank has resolved the issues, and if other marketplaces or products are also improperly protected from third party access.
Before I start, I'd like to point out that downloading those products without having purchased them first is not legal. My main motivation for writing the article is to raise awareness for the issue.
If you look at the Clickbank order process, you will notice that payments are handled by Clickbank, but that the products are provided by the merchants on their sites. The big issue here is that customers do not need accounts to buy the products, and that this means that vendors cannot protect their download pages by locking out everyone who has not an account.
Two core issues come together here:
- The product download page is not protected, for instance by making it only accessible to registered users.
- Search engines may index those links so that they become available publicly on the Internet.
The process itself has not changed in the past five years. Clickbank suggests however that merchants run scripts on their Thank you Page that checks the validity of the page visitor. The company has started to pass along values, the cbreceipt value for instance, the proof of purchase value or the item number to the thank you page. Vendors can use scripting languages like PHP or Perl to verify the visitor before the download page is displayed.
Clickbank furthermore suggests to add a meta tag to the Thank You Page that protects it from getting indexed by search engine robots. (see Protecting Your Products)
The big issue here is that these are recommendations, and that many Clickbank vendors are not making use of them.
If you search for "CLKBANK Download instructions" or CLKBANK "save as" for instance, you will come up with dozens, if not hundreds of product Thank you pages. The verification script could protect the download pages, but most sites during tests did not have that implemented. If a Thank You Page is indexed, it is an indicator that the vendor has not implemented the meta tag, and it is therefor very likely that the verification script has not been implemented as well.
You will find some broken links there. Vendors often change their Thank You Page url when they notice that it has been leaked on the Internet.
Is Clickbank the only digital marketplace that is favoring ease of access over product security? No it is not. Warrior Special Offers, or WSO, is another merchant where this is happening. These products concentrate on the Internet Marketing niche. When you search for wso thank you you will again find dozens of results that point directly to product download pages.
Those two are not the only marketplaces where virtual goods are sold.
Solution
If you, as a vendor, are limited by the marketplace protection-wise, you might want to think about switching the marketplace. It is not always a feasible thing to do, especially if the marketplace you are using is the only big player in your niche. Clickbank vendors should implement the protection suggested by the marketplace to protect their goods from being indexed by search engines and downloaded by people who have not purchased them.
Similar options may or may not be available on other marketplaces.
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Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.