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<p class="MsoNormal">My saga of securing a GeoMoose website continues. One of the issues reported in the latest security scan is that hidden directories were detected. These normally issue a 403 Forbidden response. The recommended practice is to issue a
404 Not Found response instead.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I found out how to do this through the Apache settings, and it’s pretty easy- in the http_d.cong file, add a line like this:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"MS Shell Dlg 2","sans-serif";color:black">RedirectMatch 404 "../(the_directory_name)"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"MS Shell Dlg 2","sans-serif";color:black"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"MS Shell Dlg 2","sans-serif";color:black">-That works for the majority of the hidden directories, but it falls apart with the cgi-bin directory. If I add a line in the conf file:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"MS Shell Dlg 2","sans-serif";color:black">RedirectMatch 404 "cgi-bin"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"MS Shell Dlg 2","sans-serif";color:black"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"MS Shell Dlg 2","sans-serif";color:black">-Then the application itself seems unable to access its own PHP files, or at least the errors occur when calling them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"MS Shell Dlg 2","sans-serif";color:black"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"MS Shell Dlg 2","sans-serif";color:black">This may be more a Mapserver or Apache question, but wonder if anyone here has any suggestions?</span><o:p></o:p></p>
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