A practical guide to secure and harden Apache Web Server.
1. Introduction
The Web Server is a crucial part of web-based applications. Apache Web Server is often placed at the edge of the network hence it becomes one of the most vulnerable services to attack. Having default configuration supply much sensitive information which may help hacker to prepare for an attack the web server.
The majority of web application attacks are through XSS, Info Leakage, Session Management and PHP Injection attacks which are due to weak programming code and failure to sanitize web application infrastructure. According to the security vendor Cenzic, 96% of tested applications have vulnerabilities. Below chart from Cenzic shows the vulnerability trend report of 2013.
This practical guide provides you the necessary skill set to secure Apache Web Server. In this course, we will talk about how to Harden & Secure Apache Web Server on Unix platform. Following are tested on Apache 2.4.x and I don’t see any reason it won’t work with Apache 2.2.x.
- This assumes you have installed Apache on UNIX platform. If not, you can go through Installation guide. You can also refer very free video about how to Install Apache, MySQL & PHP.
- We will call Apache installation directory /opt/apache as $Web_Server throughout this course.
- You are advised to take a backup of existing configuration file before any modification.
