this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2026
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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/

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[–] Fedditor385@lemmy.world 14 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

If you have browser with search suggestions enabled, everything you type in URL bar gets sent to a search engine like Google to give you URL suggestions. I would not be surprised if Google uses this data to check what it knows about the domain you entered, and if it sees that it doesn't know anything, it sends the bot to scan it to get more information.

But in general, you can't access a domain without using a browser which might send that what you type to some company's backend and voila, you leaked your data.

[–] derpgon@programming.dev 3 points 7 hours ago

Easily verified by creating another bunch of domains and using a browser that doesn't do tracking - like waterfox

[–] kumi@feddit.online 4 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

What you can do is segregate networks.

If the browser runs in, say, a VM with only access to the intranet and no internet access at all, this risk is greatly reduced.