Netlify has done nothing but innovate and push the needle forward for front-end devs. I’ll be there until there’s a VERY strong reason not to be.
i'd be curious to know what portion of websites they scan they know this for.
Java/Kotlin/Go/Rust/Ruby/Python/JS/TS are a lot less leaky about what language the server-side is written in. Usually the webserver used advertises itself name and in a server string, but it is considered bad practice and thus often switched off.
Reading "php" extensions in paths is a clear giveaway, so are "htm" extensions for microsoft products. Tools usually guess the language/framework based on some of these giveaways and the better the tools the less this is evident.
I jut checked some web apps I worked on, and only the one I last touched 10+ years ago is detected with buildwith.com; it's a Rails site.
All the Java/Kotlin/Rust/Hasura+Elm apps I worked on since are now shown as "Nginx" (the rev proxy in front of it).
Every programming language has holes, its just that with PHP the attack surface is much larger, so i guess people find more holes, etc..
Are you advocating “security by obscurity”?
Back in the day (!), server software used to honestly respond with things like the software name and exact version number it was running.
Naturally, that meant scanning for vulnerabilities was a lot easier than it needed to be.
There's also the way of most using runtimes/libraries that (constantly) have CVEs in them; and understanding why it is that these languages have CVEs in the first place (see my comment on "eval()").
obscurity is absolutely part of good security practice, as long as it's not all you're relying on.
Information-gathering is a common early step in any attack against a system; knowing the language & libraries involved (especially their versions) allows you to search for any existing CVEs that apply.
> Are you advocating “security by obscurity”?
I don't think OP was implying that security by obscurity alone is sufficient, just that it's unwise to advertise information that's not relevant to end users, that could help would-be attackers.
These things are not so easy, say, with a C++/Rust/Go app. Or even in most JVM configurations. JS has similar issues, that Deno is trying to mitigate to some extend.