The robots.txt Files Must Not Exist

Description

Remove any robots.txt files that may exist with any web content. Other methods must be employed if there is information on the web site that needs protection from search engines and public view. Inspect all instances of DocumentRoot and Alias and remove any robots.txt file.

$ sudo rm -f path/to/robots.txt

Rationale

Search engines are constantly at work on the Internet. Search engines are augmented by agents, often referred to as spiders or bots, which endeavor to capture and catalog web-site content. In turn, these search engines make the content they obtain and catalog available to any public web user.

To request that a well behaved search engine not crawl and catalog a site, the web site may contain a file called robots.txt. This file contains directories and files that the web server SA desires not be crawled or cataloged, but this file can also be used, by an attacker or poorly coded search engine, as a directory and file index to a site. This information may be used to reduce an attacker's time searching and traversing the web site to find files that might be relevant. If information on the web site needs to be protected from search engines and public view, other methods must be used.