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/


Have you sent the URL across any messaging services? Lots of them look up links you share to see if it’s malware (and maybe also to shovel into their AI). Even email services do this.
Nope, but that’s a good suggestion. I set this one up brand new for the experiment.