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Annoyed by phpMyAdmin scans? Set up a tarpit with mod_security!

Note: Rho’s excellent blog post pointed me in the right direction – credit where credit is due.

On my websites, I’ve seen a lot of scanning for vulnerable phpMyAdmin installations.

As a matter of policy, I don’t run phpMyAdmin on any Internet-facing web server. The scans won’t find anything, but the log entries are annoying so I decided to take action.

Some information about the attacks:

The scans originate from a variety of sources, so an IP-address block will not work.
The scans typically probe IP-addresses (not hostnames) for phpMyAdmin installations. We will use this to our advantage.

The scans cannot be prevented, but at least [...]

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