Getty Images attacks websites

Be aware of Getty Images Attackers and Scammers.

2 months ago we received a letter from Getty Images about a small image (less that 30 px size) which said it was copyright of Getty Images and we had to pay immediately a little more than 800$. I don’t know the exact sum as our attorney send the letter to the trash.

Why? Because we do have rights over the images and images are licensed via iStock and other providers.

The letter send via postal address is a scare legal tactic and included a snapshot of our website with the url where the image is supposed to be hosted.

To notice is that even the snapshot they took did not match the supposed image which was copyrighted by them. It seems nobody checks this letter before sending them.


I think the ones that violated our copyright are the ones at Getty Images, especially because they took snapshots of our website including logo and other images for printing. So go guess…

What is even worst is the next issue:

We started to received DOS attacks on the website from specific IPS, they started to crawl the main website in such an offensive way that the CPU on the server where the webserver for the website is hosted sky rockets at 100 load each time. It caused us problems for a few minutes.

When investigating some of the IPs, they were all from Israel. Example: 192.114.71.13

A further inquiry reveals this are the companies Getty Images, PicScout hires to scan websites for copyrighted images. So not only they send us a letter requesting us money for an image which is different from what was posted online but now they started to DOS our website which is illegal.

No wonder they outsource this to a company in Israel to do the dirty work as I suspect they would be sued in the US for this dossing company websites.

They seem to run all their crawlers from Bezeq International.
Nice way to play Getty Images !!!
As they own iStock now they can kiss goodbye our business as well. We don’t like threats and we sure don’t like DOS attacks.

It seems we are not the only ones that faced this issue. Searching for this blocks of IPs from Bezeg will show you reports of other people as well which reported them on several websites.