Small Steps

These are some small steps you can take to make it harder for an attacker to figure out what version of some things you have running. These are specific to ubuntu:

apache

Go into /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and change

ServerTokens Full

to

ServerTokens Prod

This will change your info for things like 404s, so instead of listing your exact os, version of apache, etc, it will only say something like ‘Apache Server at progeny.isu.edu Port 80’

postfix

change the smtpd_banner line to something like “smtpd_banner = $myhostname ESMTP $mail_name (Linux)” which will be much harder to figure out than all the crap this normally prints, which, once again, is the exact version of postfix you are running along with the os.

bind

By default, bind also lets people know all this info.  You can change this by changing the version = lines as follows

options {
…
version “back off, dirt bag!”;
…
}

Though many of these services can still be fingerprinted without too much effort, not reporting your version info for every service you run is probably a good idea.  So, for example, because of this, you may have a harder time figuring out that this server is running apache2.2 on ubuntu7.04 and postfix2.5… damn it.