is there any valid reason for users to request phpinfo()

Posted by The Journeyman geek on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by The Journeyman geek
Published on 2010-03-20T10:07:08Z Indexed on 2010/03/20 10:11 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 221

Filed under:

security

|

hacking

|

fail2ban

I'm working on writing a set of rules for fail2ban to make life a little more interesting for whoever is trying to bruteforce his way into my system. A good majority of the attempts tend to revolve around trying to get into phpinfo() via my webserver -as below

GET //pma/config/config.inc.php?p=phpinfo(); HTTP/1.1
GET //admin/config/config.inc.php?p=phpinfo(); HTTP/1.1
GET //dbadmin/config/config.inc.php?p=phpinfo(); HTTP/1.1
GET //mysql/config/config.inc.php?p=phpinfo(); HTTP/1.1

I'm wondering if there's any valid reason for a user to attempt to access phpinfo() via apache, since if not, i can simply use that, or more specifically the regex

GET //[^>]+=phpinfo\(\)

as a filter to eliminate these attacks

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