Security first, "they" are watching

Posted: 2019-07-02 09:15:22 by Alasdair Keyes

Direct Link | RSS feed


I recently registered a new .uk domain, and setup a basic website on behalf of a client. I checked the logs to see how long it took for it to be accessed without me having to advertise it's presence. The timeline is

The site uses a name-based virtualhost so the visitor had to specifically request the domain rather than just hitting port 80/443 on the server IP. Within ~6 hours of registration, the domain was already being scanned. What's of further interest is that at 17:09 at the same second two separate IPs both hit the index page for the first time, indicating it was likely a bot doing a coordinated scan of new sites.

As far as I know the domain hadn't been registered for a while (if ever) and as .uk domains don't release new registrations, the most likely way for bots/people to be aware of the new website was from the HTTPS Certificate Transparency logs. If you're unaware, every new secure certificate that's issued is published to a public log, these can be searched via a number of sites such as https://crt.sh/ (and you can see all certificates issued for akeyes.co.uk here https://crt.sh/?q=akeyes.co.uk).

The take-away from this is that you should be aware that nothing goes unnoticed on the web anymore, if you're setting up a new website, ensure that it is secure from the get-go. Make sure passwords are changed from defaults and are secure and ensure software is up-to-date as bots will be looking to exploit it, this is especially important for popular CMS apps like Wordpress.

As an aside, I found it interesting that Bing had crawled the domain within 24 hours, and Google has yet still to visit.


If you found this useful, please feel free to donate via bitcoin to 1NT2ErDzLDBPB8CDLk6j1qUdT6FmxkMmNz

© Alasdair Keyes

IT Consultancy Services

I'm now available for IT consultancy and software development services - Cloudee LTD.



Happy user of Digital Ocean (Affiliate link)


Version:master-3093fcc3d4


Validate HTML 5