Popular sites with Apache server-status enabled

Apache has a very useful functionality called server-status that allows administrators to easily find how well their servers are performing.

It is basically an HTML page that displays the number of process working, status of each request, IP addresses that are visiting the site, pages that are being queried and things like that. All good.

However, this feature can also have security implications if you leave it wide open to the world. Anyone would be able to see who is visiting the site, the URLs, and some times even find hidden (obscure) admin panels or files that should not be visible to the outside.

Talk about an awkward moment.

URL mapping and server status

We started a small crawling project in our Labs that queried over 10m different web sites (some of the crawl data is at URLfind.org). And we noticed something very interesting: Lots of web sites (some big ones) keep their server-status page open the whole world.

Here are just a few popular brands showing their status:

http://php.net/server-status/
http://metacafe.com/server-status/
http://cloudflare.com/server-status/ (FIXED)
http://disney.go.com/server-status/ (FIXED)
http://www.latimes.com/server-status/
http://www.staples.com/server-status/
http://tweetdeck.com/server-status/ (FIXED)
http://www.nba.com/server-status/
http://www.ford.com/server-status/
http://www.cisco.com/server-status/
http://www.chicagotribune.com/server-status/
http://www.yellow.com/server-status/
http://apache.org/server-status/

And many many more here: http://urlfind.org/?server-status.

Is that a big deal that I can go to staples.com/server-status/ and see all those orders/connections being made and their IPs? Or go to one of them and search for “admin-p” and find a mostly unprotected admin panel (I won’t disclose the site). Or find all the internal URLs and vhost mapping for nba.com or ford.com?

Probably not a big deal by itself (well, if you don’t have an unprotected admin panel), but that can help attackers easily find more information about these environments and use them for more complex attacks.


Simple fix

For server admins, please disable server-status or restrict it to only a set of IP addresses that really need to use it. This link explains how to do so: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_status.html.

44 comments
  1. The folks with the unprotected admin console probably think they are safe because it’s in robots.txt as globally disallowed. 😉

  2. I mentioned this in the hacker news thread on the subject, but beware when running Squid (or similar) in reverse proxy mode (which is pretty common, and may be what happened to at least some of the sites here).

    Many default apache configurations already limit requests to localhost, but if you run a reverse proxy then unless you take additional measures you can risk exposing this sort of restricted info, since apache will see all requests appear to originate from the proxy, which typically is running on localhost.

  3. 1. hiding server-status will make no difference *if* your system is secure to begin with

    2. the real fix is [Deny from all] for everything, [Allow from all] for specific resources, and [Allow from localhost] for admin stuff, accessed by ssh if required at all – And it fixes much much more than just server-status.

  4. Reveals pushdo infectees 🙂 1-048496840/18/18_10.5812300.00.460.46 118.101.101.30 defaultPOST /?ptrxcz_llmmmmmmmooooooopppppppqqqqqqq HTTP/1.1
    for instance.. (118.101.101.30 is infected) – a public service, in a way.

  5. So google’s “Cached Page” option still lists everything from ‘fixed’ sites. dunno if notifying them would help or not…

  6. Pingback: Josh Michaels
  7. Ummm…duh that’s called demonstrating your features for apache…they have nothing to hide and as an open source project its in the spirit of openness 🙂

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