WPlus archive maintenance hub

Protecting download archives

Purpose: Guidance for handling older “download-looking” URLs safely using informational pages, explicit blocks, and simple operational hygiene.

Why legacy download URLs need special care

Older “download” paths attract two audiences: users who expect a file and attackers who want a trusted-looking filename to impersonate software. If a legacy URL starts redirecting to an unrelated site, or if a file appears where a page used to be, the result can be unsafe for users and damaging to trust.

Why archives are attacked

Old download paths are attractive because they have three properties attackers love: (1) existing inbound links, (2) user intent that expects a file, and (3) a long gap in maintenance that can leave infrastructure weak. Even if a team never intended to host risky content, a compromised redirect or a modified file can turn a quiet archive into a harmful endpoint.

Serving a site as static files reduces the attack surface by removing runtime dependencies, but it does not eliminate risk by itself. The remaining work is operational: ensuring that the server cannot be trivially repointed, that the content is immutable by default, and that monitoring catches unexpected changes early.

Serve informational pages instead of files

The safest baseline is to serve a short informational page at legacy download URLs: explain what the URL historically referred to, state the current policy (no file distribution), and offer internal navigation. The goal is to meet user intent with context rather than a binary.

Equally important is what you do not publish. Avoid publishing mirror lists, “working cracks,” serial collections, or any kind of automated directory listing that could be interpreted as facilitation. For WPlus, suspicious paths are intentionally not restored as pages; they are expected to return 410 at the web server layer.

In practice, good stubs answer three questions quickly: what this URL used to represent, what it represents now, and where a user can go next inside the archive. That framing reduces “file hunting” behaviour and makes it obvious to automated systems that the page is informational, not a download endpoint.

If you need to reference a legacy filename (because that is what the web remembers), keep it as plain text and avoid anything that looks like a direct file link. The point is to preserve the historical reference without recreating a distribution surface.

Integrity signals and immutable storage habits

Even for static pages, integrity matters. Treat the deployed tree as read-only in normal operation. Use a dedicated deployment user, push via rsync to a staging folder, and then switch atomically if you need stronger guarantees. Keep a simple checksum inventory for HTML and CSS so you can detect unplanned edits, including “helpful” changes made directly on the server.

When you must reference historical filenames, do so as plain text, not as a download link. A static archive can acknowledge what existed without offering it, which is often the correct legal and safety posture.

Threat model: what can go wrong

“Download” is a magnet phrase. It attracts users looking for a file and attackers looking for a trusted-looking filename. A safe operating posture assumes that some visitors will arrive expecting a binary and some systems may try to categorize the site as a file host.

Practical risks include: URL takeover via redirects, injection of outbound links into templates, “file replacement” where a safe filename becomes a malicious payload, and reputation damage from being indexed for the wrong intent. The purpose of an archival stub is to neutralize those risks while still respecting the historical URL structure.

Safe handling checklist

Consistency is a security control. It makes anomalies obvious and reviewable.

Stub instead of file: return a short HTML page that describes the historical context and the current policy (no binaries hosted).
No mirror lists: avoid linking to third-party file hosts or enumerating “where to get it.”
No directory browsing: disable auto-index and don’t publish a “downloads directory.”
Return 410 for unsafe paths: if a path is clearly off-scope, return 410 rather than redirecting it elsewhere.
Protect against MIME confusion: add X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff and avoid serving unknown file types.
Monitor key URLs: alert on new 3xx responses and on unexpected content changes.

Example NGINX safety controls

Block common executable extensions, disable autoindex, and set safe defaults.

# Never enable autoindex for legacy download paths
autoindex off;

# Block common executable extensions (tune to your needs)
location ~* \.(exe|msi|bat|cmd|scr|ps1)$ {
  return 410;
}

add_header X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff" always;

Common mistakes

Linking to third-party file hosts: it turns an informational page into a distribution pointer.
Publishing auto-generated lists: directory indexes and “all downloads” pages are easily abused.
Serving unknown binaries: a single unexpected file can put users at risk.
Redirecting unsafe paths: redirects hide the real behavior; explicit 410 is clearer.

What we did on WPlus (mini case note)

On WPlus, legacy “download-looking” routes are handled in two ways. For historically linked pages where the safest outcome is a neutral landing, we restore a 200 HTML stub with clear “archived page” framing and internal links back to the maintenance hubs. For paths that are explicitly forbidden or suspicious, we do not create a file in the build output and instead instruct the web server to return 410 for that exact path.

That split keeps the archive helpful to legitimate users while sharply reducing the chance that the site is treated as a distribution point.

Operationally, the easiest way to enforce this is to make “stubs are allowed; binaries are not” a default rule. When something must be blocked, block it at the exact URL with a 410 rather than redirecting it elsewhere. That keeps the link graph tidy and makes monitoring simpler: you can alert on any newly introduced redirect as a high-signal anomaly.