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Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain?

287 points govideo | 3 comments | 06 Mar 25 22:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.43s | source

I have a domain that is not live. As expected, loading the domain returns: Error 1016.

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?!

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yatralalala ◴[07 Mar 25 12:49 UTC] No.43289743[source]▶
Hi, our company does this basically "as-a-service".

The options how to find it are basically limitless. Best source is probably Certificate Transparency project as others suggested. But it does not end there, some other things that we do are things like internet crawl, domain bruteforcing on wildcard dns, dangling vhosts identification, default certs on servers (connect to IP on 443 and get default cert) and many others.

Security by obscurity does not work. You can not rely on "people won't find it". Once it's online, everyone can find it. No matter how you hide it.

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1. 1970-01-01 ◴[07 Mar 25 15:12 UTC] No.43290783[source]▶
Subdomainfinder.com ??

Dozens of others will also find it.

Really, it's this simple today.

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2. binarymax ◴[07 Mar 25 15:37 UTC] No.43291004[source]▶
I think your comment resulted in a hug of death for that service ;)
3. yatralalala ◴[07 Mar 25 15:44 UTC] No.43291076[source]▶
Sorry for a bit of self promo, but just to explain we run https://reconwave.com/, basically EASM product but more focused on network/DNS/setup level.

Finding all things about domains is one of the things that we do. And yes, it's very easy.

There are many services like subdomainfinder - i.e. dnsdumpster and merklemap. We built our own as well on https://search.reconwave.com/. But it's a side project and it does not pay our bills.