Static folder with same name as a template group: It worked until today...

As the subject line says, I’ve been running EE for at least a couple of years (currently at 2.9.2) with one static folder whose name matches that of one of my template groups. There is no index file in that folder, but I use it to store images and other resources relevant to that section of our site.

It all worked fine until this morning, when suddenly going to that URL gives a 403 Forbidden error.

Changing the name of either the folder or template group would be far from ideal for several reasons. I’m waiting on my host to tell me if anything about the server configuration was changed recently, but in the meantime I’m wondering what I can do to fix this.

Any ideas?