


Unlikely server bannersĪmongst the 1.2 billion websites, there are plenty of examples of unlikely server banners. Sometimes this is done in a deliberate attempt to cloak the truth or to mislead, while in others it may simply be done as a joke waiting to be found by anyone curious enough to look for the banner. Of course, with this amount of flexibility, a cheeky or malicious administrator can configure a web server to pretend to be anything they want.


This string is not ordinarily exposed to users, but most browsers allow it to be viewed in the Network Inspector panel. It does not reveal a version number.Ī web server reveals its server banner via the Server HTTP response header. One such example is “ Apache/2.2.32 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.32 OpenSSL/1.0.2k-fips DAV/2 PHP/5.5.38”.Ĭhrome’s Network Inspector showing the HTTP response headers for, which uses the nginx web server. Many of these server banners are simply short strings like “ Apache”, while others may include additional details that reveal which other software – and which versions – are installed on the server. Most of these sites return a server banner that shows which web server software they use, thus allowing us to determine the market shares of each server vendor since 1995. Netcraft’s most recent Web Server Survey includes nearly 1.2 billion websites.
