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Harden your Apache web server
Batten the Hatches
Whether you compile Apache yourself or use a package from a repository, you need to keep the software up to date and shut down vulnerabilities as soon as possible. One way to keep on top of important information is to subscribe to Apache's Announce mailing list [1].
In addition to the web server software itself, you also need to ensure that interpreters such as PHP, Python, and Perl and the web applications you use are secured. Last but not least, every security-conscious admin patches the underlying operating system on an ongoing basis.
Installation, Modules, and Updates
As a first step, you should disable unnecessary modules. On Debian and Ubuntu this task is quite easy thanks to the a2dismod command. Otherwise, you will have to search for the LoadModule directive.
The primary candidates for disabling include autoindex, CGI/CGId, Include, UserDir, and suEXEC. To determine which modules are already built-in, type apache2 -l, and after disabling modules, call the apache2ctl -t command before restarting Apache; this action triggers a syntax check of the configuration. The results will show, among other things, whether the module you wanted to disable is still referenced.
The use of a firewall – either centrally or directly in the operating system – is also useful. In this way you can limit, for example, the number of incoming connections per IP (connlimit with iptables; meters or dynamic sets with nftables). Also, it is often not necessary to allow all outgoing connections on a web server. For example, the iptables rule
# iptables -A OUTPUT -m owner --uid-owner www-data -m state --state new -j DROP
disallows outgoing traffic from the www-data system user that does not belong to any existing
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