Subdomains.

What we check

• Every subdomain we can find that still resolves
• Where each one points, and whether anything is actually there
• Records pointing at third-party services that have been deprovisioned
• Staging, development and preview environments that are publicly reachable
• Whether any of them are indexed by search engines

The two problems this finds

Exposure. A staging site with real customer data, a preview environment with a database attached, an old admin panel on a subdomain nobody has patched in four years. These are reachable by anyone who looks, and looking is trivial.

Takeover. A subdomain pointing at a service you stopped paying for is worse than untidy. With several providers, whoever claims that name next controls what is served from your address. That means content on your domain, with your certificate, that you did not put there.

Why it accumulates

Subdomains are cheap to create and nobody is responsible for removing them. A campaign site, a trial of a hosted tool, a redirect for a rebrand, a preview link for a client. Each one made sense at the time and each one outlives the reason it existed.

When you hear from us

Immediately if a record starts pointing at something deprovisioned, since that is the one with a takeover risk attached. New subdomains and changes appear in the weekly email, so you know when something was added by someone else.