I don’t think many of you have heard of SPYSE (I didn’t before this interview) before, but let me tell you - they are amazing people, great developers and believe me when I say they are contributing great to information security community with their amazing tools and projects. I got interested and frankly heard about them when I checked out on certdb and findsubdomains projects - remarkable sites and highly recommended to have a look!

Many of us are in the security consulting business, or bug bounties, or even network intelligence and have now and then come across a need to find subdomains. The requirement can be from either side of the table - a consultant assessing a client’s internet presence, or a company validating its own digital footprint. In more than a decade, it has happened so many times that people are not aware of what old assets are they running, and hence can be exploited to either damage the brand image, or actual networks.

This year I have witnessed too many DNS stories - rising from the Government censorship programs to privacy-centric secure DNS (DNS over TLS) in order to protect the customers’ queries from profiling or profiting businesses. There are some DNS which are attempting to block the malicious sites (IBM Quad9 DNS and SafeDNS) while others are trying to give un-restricted access to the world (Google DNS and CISCO OpenDNS) at low or no costs.

How many times have you stumbled on the SSL certificate, and the only things that you cared about were Common Name (CN), DNS Names, Dates (issue and expiry)? Do you know SSL certificate can speak so much about you/ your firm? It can tell stories and motives; you can gather a good intelligence from them - which companies are hosting new domains, sub-domains; did they just revoke the last certificate? Or, why some firm switched its vendors/ CA(s)?

This article conveys my personal opinion towards security and it’s underlying revenue model; I would recommend to read it with a pinch of salt (+ tequila, while we are on it). I shall be covering either side of the coin, the heads where pentesters try to give you a heads-up on underlying issues, and tails where the businesses still think they can address security at the tail-end of their development.