I generated 16 character (upper/lower) subdomain and set up a virtual host for it in Apache, and within an hour was seeing vulnerability scans.

How are folks digging this up? What’s the strategy to avoid this?

I am serving it all with a single wildcard SSL cert, if that’s relevant.

Thanks

Edit:

  • I am using a single wildcard cert, with no subdomains attached/embedded/however those work
  • I don’t have any subdomains registered with DNS.
  • I attempted dig axfr example.com @ns1.example.com returned zone transfer DENIED

Edit 2: I’m left wondering, is there an apache endpoint that returns all configured virtual hosts?

Edit 3: I’m going to go through this hardening guide and try against with a new random subdomain https://www.tecmint.com/apache-security-tips/

  • stratself@lemdro.idEnglish
    3·
    5 hours ago

    My guess would be NSEC zone walking if your DNS provider supports DNSSEC. But that shouldn’t work with unregistered or wildcard domains

    The next guess would be during setup, someone somewhere got ahold of your SNI (and/or outgoing DNS requests). Maybe your ISP/VPN service actually logs them and announce it to the world

    I suggest next time, try setting up without any over-the-internet traffic at all. E.g. always use curl with the --resolve flag on the same VM as Apache to check if it’s working