A blank index page is a simple but incredible trick to help you secure your site directories. You just right click on your desktop or within a folder on your computer, go to New>Text Document. Once your text document is made you change the name to index.html or index.php. That’s it you’re done. Why is this so good? Why is this always on my desktop?
Simple if you create a lot of websites or use a lot of scripts you’ll be dealing with a lot of directories. The internet browsers always by default look for an index page on each directory it’s sent to. If it doesn’t find an index page it lists everything that the directory has inside.
This can be dangerous to you and your pockets because you might have paid downloads you’re trying to hide in that directory or a ton of images or programs in there. Whatever is in the directory you don’t want anyone to see it. You just drag and drop your little blank index file into your FTP program into any directories without an index file and you just saved yourself a lot of hassle.
Of course an index file won’t stop every kind of attack on your directories. If Alexa or Google or any of the other search engines decides to index your files they will still be taken. With the index file you’ll be at the very least slowing down their progress. Imagine if you had 500 files in a directory and you had that little blank index page blocking everyone out. For someone to get all 500 of those files they’d have to manually go to each link or manually search out each link to get them. If you didn’t have the index page they would land on a directory with a nice listing of all of your files and they can either scrape every file on their or they can just click on the conveniently displayed links and download everything.
There are other security benefits such as people searching for script vulnerabilities and searching out certain files, but it’s just good practice to include a blank index file inside each of your directories, get use to doing it with all of your sites. You can thank me later.
