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Webserver banner grabbing and countermeasures

Webserver Banner grabbing or fingerprinting is the method of gaining information about the target host OS. web server type, version etc. Once the hacker gets the needed information about the target OS etc, he can easily find out the vulnerabilities present in particular version and launch his attacks against it. Today we are going to see how webserver banner grabbing is performed on web servers and how to apply counter measures to it. We will see Apache and IIS 8 server examples in this article.

Apache:

Imagine I have set up a website named www.shunya.com on an Apache server. A hacker can easily find Information about the web server in different ways. For example, a hacker can visit the website and and try to open a webpage which is not existent on my server, like below.

banner grabbing

In the above example, hacker tried to open page named “admin.php” which was not available on my server and in turn the server responded with a type of web server, the target OS and the scripting language. This is giving out too much information.

The traditional and popular way of fingerprinting is through telnet. A hacker opens command line or terminal. and types the command “telnetwww.shunya.com 80″. When the screen goes black, type “HEAD / HTTP/1.0″and this will give the server information.

There are also many fingerprinting tools available. I am gonna show you only one, Id serve. Let’s see how to banner grab using Id serve.

Now what are the preventive measures we can take in Apache server to disable or atleast prevent fingerprinting to some extent. Apache web server has a configuration file called “httpd.conf” where we can make changes to fight fingerprinting. Go to httpd.conf and change the value of the option “Server Signaturetooff”.This will not display any information about server when an nonexistent page has been accessed.

In the httpd.conf file, changing the value of “Server Tokens”from “Full” to “Prod” will only show the minimum server information as shown below.

This still discloses that our web server is Apache but it doesn’t show the version. In Kautilya’s words this is delaying the march of enemy. Here are the options we set.

IIS 8:

Now imagine we changed our www.shunya.com website from Apache server to the latest version of Microsoft web server, IIS 8. To prevent error pages form revealing any information in IIS server, we can set custom error pages. Now let’s use IDserve tool to fingerprint the IIS 8 server.

It shows the server version. Now how can we prevent this. Microsoft provides a tool named UrlScan freely available for download which can be used easily to process HTTP requests. Download this tool and install it. ( See how to configure Urlscan for IIS 7.5 and IIS 8 ). Then go to the configuration file of UrlScan, “UrlScan.ini” located at “C:WindowsSystem32inetservUrlscan”by default and change the value of “RemoveServerHeader’ from “0″ to “1″.

This will not reveal the server version information as shown below.

We can further mislead the attacker by setting our server name to some other value different than our original one. This can be done by setting the value of “RemoveServerHeader” to “0 “and changing the value of “AlternateServerName” to the value we want to specify ( in our example Nginx ).

So when the attacker tries to fingerprint our website, he will be misleaded.

Note: Taking this preventive measures will not stop a determined hacker to find out our server information.

That’s all in webserver banner grabbing and countermeasures.