How secure is your Recruitment website? Part 1 - Server Directory Listings


Posted By: Thomas Shaw, 9:08pm Thursday 28 May 2009

Every day, I am informed of another insecure recruitment website. How could this still be possible? The economic downturn has lead to an increase in data theft, with recruitment agencies one of the easiest targets. Information is an asset that, like other important business assets, has value.

Remember the issues with Monster? RCSA? CareerOne? NSW Government?

Websites are built with a structure - they contain files and folders. Hackers can deconstruct your website structure by reverse engineering the source code, or simply reading the robots.txt file.

Try this basic test…

In your web browser enter your URL/images/ - just the name of your images folder, nothing else afterwards except for the trailing /

If you see a “Forbidden” or 403 error message, that’s normal, but if you see a list of files and folder names, it means that your server is configured to allow for directory browsing!

Also try other folder names such as images, conn, includes, modules, system, admin, administration, secure, css, js, javascripts, clients, resumes, documents, scripts

You need to contact your website developer or server host to have your server directory listings turned OFF


Protecting your directories from being listed by your website's visitors does not, in and of itself, make your website more secure. At best, it's security by obscurity - that is, you hope that by hiding stuff from view, visitors will not be able to get access to your files.