Different ways of Subdomain enumeration

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An information security professional wrote a list of the most popular methods, the expert tried to make a list of some tools and online resources to exploit them. Of course this list is far from exhaustive, there is much new stuff every day, but it’s still a good start.

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Methods

Brute force

This is the easiest way. Try millions and millions words as subdomains and check which ones are alive with a forward DNS request.

Zone transfer aka AXFR

Zone transfer is a mechanism that administrators can use to replicate DNS databases but sometimes the DNS is not well configured and this operation is allowed by anyone, revealing all subdomains configured.

DNS cache snooping

DNS cache snooping is a specific way to query a DNS server in order to check if a record exists in his cache.

Reverse DNS

Try to find the domain name associated with an IP address, it’s the opposite of Forward DNS.

Alternative names

Once the first round of your recon is finished, apply permutations and transformations (based on another wordlist maybe?) to all subdomains discovered in order to find new ones.

Online DNS tools

There are many websites that allow to query DNS databases and their history.

SSL Certificates

Request information about all certificates linked to a specific domain, and obtain a list of subdomains covered by these certificates.

Search engines

Search for a specific domain in your favorite search engine then minus the discovered subdomains one by one site:example.com -www -dev

Technical tools/search engines

More and more companies host their code online on public platform, most of the time these services have a search bar.

Text parsing

Parse the HTML code of a website to find new subdomains; this can be applied to every resources of the company, office documents as well.

VHost discovery

Try to find any other subdomain configured on the same web server by brute forcing the Host header.

Tools

Altdns: alternative names brute forcing

Amass: brute force, Google, VirusTotal, alt names

aquatone-discover: Brute force, Riddler, PassiveTotal, Threat Crowd, Google, VirusTotal, Shodan, SSL Certificates, Netcraft, HackerTarget, DNSDB

BiLE-suite: HTML parsing, alt names, reverse DNS

blacksheepwall: AXFR, brute force, reverse DNS, Censys, Yandex, Bing, Shodan, Logontube, SSL Certificates, Virus Total

Bluto: AXFR, netcraft, brute force

brutesubs: enumall, Sublist3r, Altdns

cloudflare_enum: Cloudflare DNS

CTFR: SSL Certificates

DNS-Discovery: brute force

DNS Parallel Prober: DNS resolver

dnscan: AXFR, brute force

dnsrecon: AXFR, brute force, reverse DNS, snoop caching, Google

dnssearch: brute force

domained: Sublist3r, enumall, Knockpy, SubBrute, MassDNS, recon-ng

enumall: recon-ng -> Google, Bing, Baidu, Netcraft, brute force

Fierce: AXFR, brute force, reverse DNS

Knockpy: AXFR, virustotal, brute force

MassDNS: DNS resolver

Second Order: HTML parsing

Sonar: AXFR, brute force

SubBrute: brute force

Sublist3r: Baidu, Yahoo, Google, Bing, Ask, Netcraft, DNSdumpster, VirusTotal, Threat Crowd, SSL Certificates, PassiveDNS

theHarvester: reverse DNS, brute force, Google, Bing, Dogpile, Yahoo, Baidu, Shodan, Exalead

TXDNS: alt names (typo/tld)

vhost-brute: vhost discovery

VHostScan: vhost discovery

virtual-host-discovery: vhost discovery

Online DNS tools

https://hackertarget.com/

https://searchdns.netcraft.com/

https://dnsdumpster.com/

https://www.threatcrowd.org/

https://riddler.io/

https://api.passivetotal.org

https://www.censys.io

https://api.shodan.io

https://www.dnsdb.org/f/

https://www.dnsdb.info/

https://scans.io/

https://findsubdomains.com/

https://securitytrails.com/dns-trails

https://crt.sh/

https://certspotter.com/api/v0/certs?domain=example.com

https://transparencyreport.google.com/https/certificates

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/ct

Search engines

https://www.baidu.com/

https://www.yahoo.com/

https://www.google.com/

https://www.bing.com/

https://www.yandex.ru/

https://www.exalead.com/search/

https://www.dogpile.com/

https://www.zoomeye.org/

https://fofa.so/

Technical tools/search engines

https://github.com/

https://gitlab.com/

https://www.virustotal.com/fr/

DNS cache snooping

nslookup -norecursive domain.com

nmap -sU -p 53 –script dns-cache-snoop.nse –script-args ‘dns-cache-snoop.mode=timed,dns-cache-snoop.domains={domain1,domain2,domain3}’ <ip>

Others online resources

https://ask.fm/

https://logontube.com/

Homepage

https://www.sitedossier.com/