I am on a friends server and I have found a potential security flaw where I can access other sites files on the server. He says he is on a shared hosting and I am not sure yet if the other sites are his or not, he has to get back to me on that. In the meantime though I was wondering how do sites like godaddy deal with this issue? Do they put each account on the server into a sort of virtual server so you can access your other sites on your account but can not access sites on other accounts? It might be the case that his server is working properly and all the sites I can access are his sites anyway since they are under his account.If they are all his sites then how can he prevent other sites from accessing other sites since some of them are for other peoples sites he manages for them.
Stop other sites on server from being able to access other sites on server
web hosting;php;apache
Generally this should not happen. I do not use a web host, but I used to be in that business and I do carve up some servers here so I have still have a hand in it.Generally speaking, when a user creates several sites without creating a new user for each site, the one user can see all of the sites. Let say a second user is created, they can be within the same group as the first user that created the sites and have access to all the sites. This happens more times than people think. In reality, the two accounts should not be in the same group.Typically, if I were to sell an account, that user would only have access to the web space I carve out for them. That user in turn can create users under their account that would have access to the web space created for them or can have admin access that allows more access. The safest thing that can be done is to create a user account for every website and that each website can only be accessed by that user or by the system admins which would require root access to be able to modify files settings and such.It sounds like your friend either has goofed up, trusts you, or just does not know how to carve up and manage web space. It sounds like you have a huge security hole that needs to be plugged ASAP.