How to configure Apache so that requests for non-existing pages are redirected to the home page.

In some occasions, you don't want people to get 404 messages when they surf to pages or folders that don't exist on your web server (anymore). For example, when you have Basic Authentication, end users only get the pop-up that requests them to authenticate when they surf to an existing page or folder. The security impact of this is that when attackers perform a brute force scan on your file server, they can easily detect whether pages and folders exist or not: