ID: IRCNE2012111664
Date: 2012-11-05
According to "techworld", many Apache web servers, including those hosting some popular websites, expose information about the internal structure of the sites they host, the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of their visitors, the resources users access and other potentially sensitive details because their status pages are left unprotected.
The Apache mod_status module generates a "server status" page that contains information about the server's CPU and memory load, as well as details about active user requests, including paths to various internal files and IP addresses.
While this page can be a valuable resource for server administrators, the information it exposes can help hackers better plan their attacks, said Daniel Cid, chief technology officer of web security firm Sucuri.
Sucuri researchers ran a test that involved crawling over 10 million websites and found hundreds of them that expose their server status pages to the whole world. The list of affected websites includes php.net, metacafe.com, disney.go.com, staples.com, nba.com, cisco.com, ford.com, apache.org and many others. Some of them have fixed the problem since Sucuri's report, but many haven't.
At first glance, the solution is simple: add access control directives in the server configuration file in order to restrict access to the /server-status path and only allow access to IP addresses that need to have access to the page.
However, server administrators need to consider the configuration of their whole web infrastructure, because there are some scenarios in which the Apache access control directives could be inadvertently bypassed.
Larger companies might run dedicated web caching servers. However, even in those cases, if the Apache access control rules for /server-status allow access to the whole IP range of the internal network, which includes the caching servers, the same problem would occur.
"You'd have to take extra steps to ensure you didn't expose this," Povey said. "Server-status et al [other server info pages like the one generated by mod_info] is something that is easy to overlook."
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