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ochieng seth
ochieng seth

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security tip for your website

Attackers can easily exploit your web app if they know the version of the server you are running and most web servers like nginx transmit this data by default😳. Let's try the following line of code in any terminal to get your domain's server info.

curl --head yourdomain.com
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My result looks like so..

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/<SERVER_VERSION>(<OPERATING_SYSTEM>)
Date: Thu, 03 Mar 2022 13:46:14 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 162
Connection: keep-alive
Location: https://jast-tech.com/
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you might be using apache, no worries i gat you😌

Our simple task now is to hide the <SERVER_VERSION>

  1. FOR NGINX edit the nginx configuration file
nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
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Under the #HTTP Options line and before the ## line, add the following

server_tokens off;
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save changes with ctrl + x and we are done😜
restart your server with sudo systemctl restart nginx and you can try curl --head yourdomain.com to get your server version.

2.FOR APACHE
edit the apache configuration file

nano /etc/httpd/httpd.conf
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change ServerTokens Prod and ServerSignature Off
now one more step, look for

<Location "/server-status">
    SetHandler server-status
</Location>
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and change it to

<Location "/server-status">
    SetHandler server-status
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
</Location>
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😛We are done, just restart your server with sudo service apache2 restart
Enjoy. 👋🏿

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