Sometimes ago I wondered myself why my website bandwidth showed outrageous usage which didn't correlate with the traffic (I'm talking about QMC online). Well, the previous post explains why this thing happen. Ok, now I'm gonna tell you what you are supposed to do to avoid this kind of activity from happening on your server.
Basically, it happens when webmasters forget to put index.htm or index.html at the directory where the downloadable stuffs reside. Putting this index.htm file might look trivial but it will protect your directory from wandering trespassers. This file will effectively redirect users who are trying to crawl into your directories to the page you specify.
Here's the simple code I use in my directories across my domain. Put the following code between <body> and </body> inside your index.htm or index.html.
<script language="javascript">
window.location="http://yourdomain.net/front.htm";
</script>Set the URL to where you want the users to be redirected to and they won't be able to freely sneak into your particular directories. For server with limited bandwidth, this code is proven to be effective to avoid your bandwidth from reaching its bottleneck unneccesarily.
