Mask Your Web Server for Enhanced Security
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by Joe Lima
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Netcraft is Watching
Take a look at the "What's that site running?" tool on Netcraft. If you point the site profiling tool at your own Web site, it will probably correctly report both your Web server and OS. Changing your HTTP Server header will cause Netcraft to report a false value for your Web server -- or just "unknown" if the header is completely removed (the change is not immediate, as Netcraft caches results for a time).

Still, your OS will probably be correctly identified -- even behind a good firewall. To get Netcraft to report your OS as "unknown", you will have to tinker with some of your default TCP/IP settings, such as the receive window size (RWIN), the maximum transmission units (MTU), the maximum segment size (MSS), and/or the IP header time-to-live (TTL). Altering these settings will affect your server's performance in diverse ways, depending on network conditions, so considerable care should be taken when changing these defaults. In the hands of a skilled network administrator, however, this strategy can be an effective countermeasure to information leakage through stack scanning.

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