.thaccess tempered with

[pcmarket]

Last week I received an email from adsense for tos violation. It included the offending url and gave me 72 hours to remove this content from that page or any similar content on my networks.

The problem is that the page in question was not mine. It was a redirect done at .htaccess.

I am in the process of adding the following in all my .htaccess files:
<Files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>

In the hope that it will prevent anyone from accessing that file and modifying with things like:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^check_work/$ ./geo/hfc.php?checkwork
RewriteRule ^geo-(.*)/$ ./geo/hfc.php?$1

Here is my two questions which hopefully someone has an answer for:

1. Is the <Files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>
Sufficient to prevent some one from modifying my .htaccess file in the future and..

2. The rewriterule that was added doesn't include a proper url. How does it know which url to serve then?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Jacques

[Nik]

Why not just change the file permissions settings of .htaccess to only read. Then no one would be able to edit it.

[pcmarket]

That is what I am doing now. On one server, I had 33 sites which had their .htaccess altered. I am setting them up as 640.

The hosting company is telling me: "you must have an exploitable webscript on the server somewhere. So by sending bad variables to whatever script it is, they were able to modify the writable .htaccess files. I'd recommend you upgrade all scripts you're running ASAP and look for any files that look unfamiliar."

My question is, is there something I should look for in terms of a particular file or an obvious line of code that would be responsible for this behavior?

[Nik]

Hmm, I wish I could help more. I'm not a programmer so I don't have any ideas on the type of code that would be causing this.

[pcmarket]

Thank you for your help. I appreciate it. I have a question about adsense multiple accounts but I'll post it in the relevant thread.