Finding Needle in The Haystack!
The Hunt Begins
Every security researcher knows the feeling, staring at a target domain, wondering where the vulnerabilities hide. Sometimes the most devastating findings come not from the main application, but from the forgotten corners of an organization’s digital infrastructure. This is the story of how a wildcard subdomain led me down a rabbit hole that ended with access to an entire company’s AWS infrastructure and the personal data of millions of users.
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Chapter 1: The Wildcard in the Wild
It started like any other recon. Subdomain enumeration on redacted.com was returning the usual suspects – www, mail, blog. But then something interesting caught my eye: *.corp.redacted.com. A wildcard subdomain. In the security world, wildcards are like unmarked doors in a long hallway, you never know what's behind them until you try the handle.
I spun up my brute-forcing tools, feeding them a carefully crafted wordlist of common corporate services:
- jenkins.corp.redacted.com
- gitlab.corp.redacted.com
- jira.corp.redacted.com
- redmine.corp.redacted.com