I was just checking the logs of my personal junk site, and I find that the image files for a preview website that I’d designed for someone and put on the site for the client to view has been accessed by an IP address in Germany. A few details:[ul][]My client is the only one person to whom I’ve given the URL of this subdirectory, and he’s nothing to do with Germany.[]There’s no link to this subdirectory.[]Directory browsing is turned off. []In the logs, the German IP address had no referring page for each file it accessed.[/ul] How on earth could a third party access specific files this directory?
Couldn’t someone gain access simply by guessing and trying various subdirectory names? If the name is something common like “images” or “temp files” I could see this happening rather easily.
Also, athough you say that there are no links to the subdirectory, are there any outgoing links from this directory that could be traced backwards?
Hmm, the images file is indeed called “images”, but the directory it’s in is called “partry”, which isn’t a real word - for example one of the files accessed was:
[my url]/partry/images/arch.jpg
Also, no HTML pages were accessed, and as I said there was no referring URL that normally occurs on an image linked from a page.
There are no reverse links. It’s entirely isolated.
There are tools out there which can look at and grab an entire web site, including orphaned directores and files.
You don’t say if your site is housed on a Microsoft Windows server, a UNIX server, Linux, etc., nor whether you use FrontPage or another web tool to maintain your site.
My logs regularly show attempted infiltrations (none are ever successful), for example, most often exploiting known weaknesses in MS servers. Many web servers are set up using out-of-the-box default settings, making it that much easier to exploit known weaknesses. Since so many people are not imaginative when it comes to computer, in general, or web sites, in particular, a tech savvy person has to do very little work to gain “access” to a site.
The classic cases are the known holes and exploits with computers. When you hear about a computer virus/worm/trojan/whatever “infecting” thousands of computers it’s running up against the law of averages because so many computer users and systems administrators do not take the time to perform even the most basic maintenance and upkeep.
You should contact your ISP for assistance. Chances are, it was a random sweep and the bot did not find anything to flag and return later.
A general rule you must accept is that if it’s accessible on the Internet to you, it’s accessible to anyone. The vast majority of web sites out there are full of holes. Then again, the vast majority have nothing of value.
:smack:
OK, the problem was in the mind-to-keyboard interface.
It helped for me actually to visit the site (which I haven’t done for weeks).
Somehow the client front page that referenced the logged image files had ended up on the front page of the site. I am a damn fool.
:smack: