Gamma Fraud Filter 0.9 (Beta)

Installation Instructions

Content

Overview
System Requirements
Features
Installation
Feedback
Links

Overview

Fraud Filter is a protection system against fraudulent traffic. It can be integrated in any existing Perl script. Affiliate programs, PPC engines, banner exchanges are the best candidates for this script. Fraud Filter blocks traffic from suspicious hosts (open proxies, spam sources, etc) listed in various DNS blacklists. It also can block traffic from certain countries and IP addresses.

System Requirements

The Fraud Filter requirements are as follows:

Unix-based HTTP server.
Perl 5.0 or above.
The libnet and Net-DNS Perl modules (supplied with the script).

Features

Gamma Fraud Filter has the following key features:

Easy installation and configuration.
Efficient blocking of open proxies using numerous DNS blacklists.
Blocking by IP address or country.
Detailed statistics.

Configuring Fraud Filter

Installing Fraud Filter

To install Fraud Filter you need to do the following steps:

Unpack the downloaded archive. It contains the FraudFilter directory with all the files.
You may need to change the path to the perl executable in the first line of the gff.cgi script. The default path is /usr/bin/perl.
Upload the FraudFilter directory to your site cgi-bin directory or to any other directory where you can run cgi scripts.
Set executable permission to gff.cgi. You can do it by executing the chmod a+x gff.cgi from the shell or using your FTP client. Depending on your server configuration, you may need to set world-writable permission to the data and data/log directories.
Open gff.cgi in your browser. Log in the administrative area with the password changeme. Click on the configuration link and change the password.
Now you may configure the script for your needs:
Use Filters

Select active filters.

Set Action
When determine a possible fraudulent host, script can do one of the following actions:
- Deny - Halt the execution of the script,
- Redirect - Redirect to the specified URL,
- Pass - Do nothing, but log this request.
Ban Hosts

Specify here the list of the known fraudulent hosts. It is a whitespace-separated list of IP addresses and domains. You also may include IP ranges in the form 3.2.1.0-3.2.1.255 or 10.20.0.0-10.20.255.255.

Ban Countries

First you need to is to update the IP-to-country database. Click the Update button to do this. Update the database regularly. Now you can select the countries you want to block.

Select DNS Blacklists

Select DNS Blacklists you want to use for filtering.

Integrating Fraud Filter

You need to integrate Fraud Filter with your Perl scripts. Do the following steps:

Choose the script you need to modify. Typically this is a script which is subjected to fraudulent traffic.
To enable protection, you need to call the function FraudFilter from the filter.pl module. filter.pl is located in the FraudFilter directory. Generally it is enough to add the following two lines
require "/path/to/filter.pl";
FraudFilter;
near the top of the script. Replace /path/to/filter.pl with the actual path. Be sure to make a backup copy of the script.
Now you can test your modifications. Open the script that you've modified in your browser. It should work as always. Now open gff.cgi and block your own IP address or country. Set Action to Redirect and Redirect URL to http://www.gammacenter.com/. Open the modified script again. If you're redirected to our site, the script is modified correctly.

You may repeat these steps for every script you want to protect.

If you have problems with installation or integration, please contact us.

Advanced Usage

You need to have some programming skills to understand the following instructions.

The function FraudFilter accepts the optional parameters:
FraudFilter(script, origin, address)

script: Identifies the protected script. By default, it is the script filename.
origin: You may use this parameter to identify the faker. It is an affiliate ID for an affiliate script and so on.
address: This is the IP address for testing. By default, it is REMOTE_ADDR.

The function returns false value for valid addresses. Otherwise it returns a hash reference:
{
    address => IP address,
    blocker => blocker ID,
    description => the reason,
}

Feedback

We are very interested in your feedback. You can fill in the following form

or contact us by e-mail. If you have purchased or downloaded our scripts, please include the Product ID in your message. You may find it in the LICENSE.txt file.