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287 points govideo | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.65s | 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 ◴[] 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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TZubiri ◴[] No.43289843[source]
"Security by obscurity does not work"

This is one of those false voyeur OS internet tennets designed to get people to publish their stuff.

Obscurity is a fine strategy, if you don't post your source that's good. If you post your source, that's a risk.

The fact that you can't rely on that security measure is just a basic security tennet that applies to everything: don't rely on a single security measure, use redundant barriers.

Truth is we don't know how the subdomain got leaked. Subdomains can be passwords and a well crafted subdomain should not leak, if it leaks there is a reason.

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yapyap ◴[] No.43290616[source]
> This is one of those false voyeur OS internet tennets designed to get people to publish their stuff.

No it isn’t, it’s a push to get people to login protect whatever they want to keep to themselves.

It’s silly to say informing people that security through obscurity is a weak concept is trying to convince them to publish their stuff.

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HeatrayEnjoyer ◴[] No.43291594[source]
If security through obscurity didn't provide any benefit then governments wouldn't have built entire frameworks for protecting classified information.
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ehutch79 ◴[] No.43291671[source]
So the only thing protecting classified docs is the public not knowing where they are? That's what security through obscurity is.
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1. HeatrayEnjoyer ◴[] No.43298131[source]
No, it's not the only thing, but it is one layer of defense in depth.

No one is saying that obfuscation should be the only layer. Your defense should never hinge on any single protection layer.

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2. ehutch79 ◴[] No.43302358[source]
So we're all agreeing here. It's ok to hide stuff from sight, but hiding stuff from sight isn't actually security and can't replace at the very least, having password protection.
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3. HeatrayEnjoyer ◴[] No.43343986[source]
But it is security. It's one layer of it.