Site: August 2006 Archives

Thought I'd pass along a great deal on a 512 mb SD card:
Kingston 512 MB Secure Digital Card $6.99
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When I installed mod_security yesterday, I was hoping for some good results. Those results I figured could be tracked by watching my visitor and hits statistics return to somewhat normal values, as well as seeing OS and Browser versions return to something more that I would expect from my geeky audience

Well, in only one day, I am proud to say that modsecurity has more than beat my expectations. Visitor counts have returned down to the humble amount this little blog can expect, hits are way down, and already, safari , mozilla, and Linux have moving back up in marketshare , instead of the hyperinflated number for the windows/IE bots that were hitting this box.
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In the last month I have been getting nailed with various forms of referral spam , and various annoying exploit attempts. Besides the sheer annoyance of it all, the way it screws up your logs and stats, I just didn't want them to think their stuff was working. So I finally implemented some mod_security rules into my apache.

I extended the default debian ruleset with a few that I found online, and things seem to be working well. I hope not too much of a performance hit on this little box (if so, please tell me). I've only had two issues with it so far:

1. Default rules blocked my cookies. The default rules had a very basic regex for cookie data, didn't' work with my system
2. Debug Log. The debugging by default is at 9, and that very quickly filled up a 2gb file, which then killed apache