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When a CA issues an SSL/TLS certificate, they're required to submit it to public CT logs (append-only, cryptographically verifiable ledgers). This was designed to detect misissued or malicious certificates.
Red and Blue team alike use this resource (crt.sh) to enumerate subdomains.
You need to look at the DNS server used by whatever client is resolving that name. If it's going to an external recursive resolver instead of using your own internal DNS server then you could be leaking lookups to the wider internet.
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
Chrome: Sees new website domain
Google: 👀
Crawlers typically crawl by ip.
Are u sure they just not using ip?
U need to expressly configure drop connection if invalid domain.
I use similar pattern and have 0 crawls.
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.
Easily verified by creating another bunch of domains and using a browser that doesn't do tracking - like waterfox
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.
Maybe that particular subdomain is getting treated as the default virtual host by Apache? Are the other subdomains receiving scans too?
I don't use Apache much, but NGINX sometimes surprises on what it uses if the default is not specifically defined.
A long time ago, I turned a PC in my basement into a web server. No DNS. Just a static IP address. Within 15 minutes, the logs showed it was getting scanned.
SSL encrypts traffic in-transit. You need to set up auth/access control. Even better, stick it behind a Web Application Firewall.
Or set up a tunnel. Cloudflare offers a free one: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/networks/connectors/cloudflare-tunnel/
if you use Let’s Encrypt (ACME protocol) AFAIK you can find all domains registered in a directory that even has a search, no matter if it’s wildcard or not.
It was something like this https://crt.sh/ but can’t find the site exactly anymore
LE: you can also find some here https://search.censys.io/
Holy shit... I thought it was DNS resolver selling these data
This.
That's why temping obscurity for security is not a good idea. Doesn't take much to be "safe", at least reasonably safe. But that not much its good practice to be done :)
No. Not this.
Op is doing hidden subdomain pattern. Wildcard dns and wildcard ssl.
This way subdomain acts as a password and application essentially inaccessible for bot crawls.
Works very well
Apparently it doesn't.
minimal setup is still required 🤷
Holy shit, this has every cert I’ve ever generated or renewed since 2015.
Certificate Transparency makes public all issued certificates in the form of a distributed ledger, giving website owners and auditors the ability to detect and expose inappropriately issued certificates.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CA | (SSL) Certificate Authority |
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| SSL | Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption |
| TLS | Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
[Thread #990 for this comm, first seen 11th Jan 2026, 01:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Good bot
Kudos to the bot.
For anyone who needs to read it: At the end of the day this is obscurity, not security; however obscurity is a good secondary defense because it buys time.
I too would be interested to learn how this leaked
Isnt security mostly achieved by heavy obscurity? A password secures because other people dont know what it is, it is obscured.
They're not the same.
Hiding an unlocked treasure chest in the forest is obscurity. Sure, you might be the only one who knows it's there at first but eventually someone might come across it.
Having a vault at a bank branch is security - everyone knows there's a vault there, but you'll be damned if you're going to get into it when you're not authorized.
Good passwords, when implemented correctly, use hashing (one way encryption) to provide security. It's not obscured, people know you need a password to access the thing (in our example)
In cryptography, there’s a difference between “secrets” (like passwords and encryption keys), and hiding / obscuring something (like steganography or changing your web server to run on a different port)
it's not even obscurity; it's logged publicly.
It's not. Wildcard DNS and wildcard cert. Domain is not logged publicly.
People that keep saying logged publicly simply don't understand setup and technology
How is it being logged publicly? Like OP said there is no specific subdomain registered in the DNS records (instead using a wildcard). Same for the SSL cert. Only things I can think of is the browser leaking the subdomains (through google or Microsoft) or the DNS queries themselves being logged and leaked. (Possibly by the ISP inspecting the traffic or logging and leaking on their own DNS servers?). I would hardly call either of those public.
I run my webservers behind a pfsense firewall with ssl offloading(using a wildcard cert) with a static IP and use Haproxy to have sub-domain's go to individual servers. Even though I've seen my fair share of scans, I only ever expose port 443 and keep things updated.
Recently though someone on here mentioned routing everything over Tailscale via a VPS. I didn't want to pay for a VPS and frankly can't even find one that is reasonably priced in the US(bandwidth limits mainly), so I threw Tailscale onto my pfsense, setup split-dns on Tailscale's admin panel with my domain name, and then reconfigured Haproxy to listen on my Tailscale interface. Even got IPv6 working(huge pain due to a bug it seems). Oh and setup pfblocker.
My current plan is I'm going to run my webservers behind Tailscale and keep my game servers public and probably segment those servers to a different vlan/subnet/dmz/whatever. And maybe just have a www/blog landing page that is read only on 443 and have it's config/admin panel accessible via my tailscale only.
Anyway, back on topic. I run my game servers and I don't advertise them out anywhere(wildcard cert) and do whitelist only, yet I still see my minecraft servers get hit constantly on port 25565.
So not much you can do except minimize exposure as much as possible.
Reverse DNS? Or vuln scans just hitting IPs. Don't need DNS for that.
Op is doing hidden subdomain pattern. Wildcard dns and wildcard ssl.
This way subdomain acts as a password and application essentially inaccessible for bot crawls.
Works very well
Do post again if you figure it out!
Will do!
We're always watching.
You say you have a wildcard cert but just to make sure: I don't suppose you've used ACME for Letsencrypt or some other publicly trusted CA to issue a cert including the affected name? If so it will be public in Certificate Transparency Logs.
If not I'd do it again and closely log and monitor every packet leaving the box.
The random name is not in the public log. Someone else suggested that earlier. I checked CRT.sh and while my primary domain is there, the random one isn't.
My next suspicion from what you've shared so far apart from what others suggested would be something out of the http server loop.
Have you used some free public DNS server and inadvertently queried it with the name from a container or something? Developer tooling building some app with analytics not disabled? Any locally connected AI agents having access to it?
All the obvious things have been mentioned.
The only way to identify the problem is to share the exact steps youve followed and then others can reproduce.
Based on what youve told us, no one knows how the subdomain is leaked. Without meaning to be derisive, that suggests that something youve told us isn't quite correct.
Well, the good news is that I at least think I'm doing all the right things.
I'll spin up a new VM tomorrow and start from scratch.
Did you yourself make a request to it or just set it up and not check it? My horrifying guess it that if you use SNI in a request every server in the middle could read the subdomain and some system in the internet routing is untrustworthy.
Are you sure they're hitting the hostname and not just the IP directly?
Shows up by name in the apache other_hosts...log, so yes
I need to make sure to 444 drop connection immediately if wrong domain. Redirect to https should be configured after - I suspect ur config redirects
Going to IP directly could redirect to your first domain. This would trigger another request to your domain and could result in your logs.