The other day I found out that one of my ads.txt files was hacked. Did some search and saw this article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/adstxt-zero-day-exploit-wild-brief-history-fraud-ad-fraud-historian/ How do you guys protect your ads.txt file from being hacked? I reset chmod from 0644 to 0400. Obviously, Adsense now can't find/crawl the ads.txt. The ads are being served and generate income, but they are (as it appears) just random ads.
Resetting the chmod to 0400 is a solid step for protection, but it can indeed block crawlers like AdSense from accessing it. You might want to consider re-evaluating your file permissions and implementing more security measures, like regular backups and monitoring for unauthorized changes, to keep your .txt files safe while still allowing necessary access.