However...I have a subdomain with a not obvious name, like: userfileupload.sampledomain.com
This subdomain IS LIVE but has NOT been publicized/posted anywhere. It's a custom URL for authenticated users to upload media with presigned url to my Cloudflare r2 bucket.
I am using CloudFlare for my DNS.
How did the internet find my subdomain? Some sample user agents are: "Expanse, a Palo Alto Networks company, searches across the global IPv4 space multiple times per day to identify customers' presences on the Internet. If you would like to be excluded from our scans, please send IP addresses/domains to: scaninfo@paloaltonetworks.com", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_7; en-us) AppleWebKit/534.20.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Safari/534.20.8", "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 9; Redmi Note 5 Pro) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/76.0.3809.89 Mobile Safari/537.36",
The bots are GET requests which are failing, as designed, but I'm wondering how the bots even knew the subdomain existed?!
~5 billion scans in a few hours is nothing for a company with decent resources. OP: in case you didn't follow, they're literally trying every possible IPv4 address and seeing if something exists on standard ports at that address.
I believe it would be harder to find out your domain that way if you were using SNI and only forwarded/served requests that used the correct host. But if you aren't using SNI, your server is probably just responding to any TLS connect request with your subdomain's cert, which will reveal your hostname.
It's very common for people to read only up to the point they feel they can comment, then skip immediately to the comment. So, basically, noone read it.