V-13727

Discussion

These requirements are set to mitigate the effects of several types of denial of service attacks. Although there is some latitude concerning the settings themselves, the requirements attempt to provide reasonable limits for the protection of the web server. If necessary, these limits can be adjusted to accommodate the operational requirement of a given system. From Apache.org: The StartServers directive sets the number of child server processes created on startup. As the number of processes is dynamically controlled depending on the load, there is usually little reason to adjust this parameter. The default value differs from MPM to MPM. For worker the default is StartServers 3. For prefork defaults to 5 and for mpmt_os2 to 2.

Check Content

Locate the Apache httpd.conf file.  If you cannot locate the file, you can do a search of the drive to find the location of the file.  

Open the httpd.conf file with an editor and search for the following directive:

StartServers

The value needs to be between 5 and 10 

If the directive is set improperly, this is a finding.

If the directive does not exist, this is NOT a finding because it will default to 5.  It is recommended that the directive be explicitly set to prevent unexpected results if the defaults change with updated software.

NOTE: This vulnerability can be documented locally with the ISSM/ISSO if the site has operational reasons for the use of increased or decreased value. If the site has this documentation, this should be marked as Not a Finding.