In the realm of cybersecurity –, in penetration testing and bug bounty hunting – subdomain enumeration is key to revealing concealed access points that may be exploited by attackers. Subdomains typically harbor services that receive scrutiny and could present targets for malicious actors. Although discovering subdomains can be time intensive tools such, as Merkle Map streamline this process by efficiently exposing these covert domains to security professionals.
Lets delve into Merkle Map. A tool, for uncover subdomains, by tapping into passive data sources in this article today! We’ll cover its functionality and standout features while discussing real world scenarios where Merkle Map can elevate your security research endeavors.
What is Merklemap?
Merklemap is subdomain finder tool which is designed to leverage Certificate transparency (Certificate Transparency: Certificate Transparency is an open framework for monitoring SSL Certificates. Domain owners may find it useful to monitor certificate issuance for their domain and use that to detect miss issued certificates. Prior to CT, there was not an efficient way to get a comprehensive list of certificates issued to your domain.) logs for enhanced monitoring. Merklemap’s backend and data ingestion is written in rust.
Key features of MerkleMap:
- Near real-time ingestion of CT logs
- Full-string subdomain search capability
- Support for an arbitrary number of wildcards in searches
This is the website URL.
They have a CLI version on GitHub https://github.com/barre/merklemap-cli
Features:
You can add wildcards.
For example, if you’re looking for subdomains of example.com, a search like *.example.com would return any subdomains like mail.example.com, blog.example.com, or dev.example.com.
Prefix with = for exact matches:
- Using the
=symbol before a search term ensures that you only get exact matches. - For example, if you search for
=www.example.com, the search results will only return the specificwww.example.comsubdomain, and not anything else likeshop.example.com.
This tip is essentially about controlling the specificity of your search results.
Practical Use Cases
Bug Bounty Hunting:
For bug bounty hunters, subdomain enumeration is a vital step in reconnaissance. By identifying hidden or forgotten subdomains, hunters can discover new attack surfaces that organizations may have overlooked. These subdomains often host older or less secure applications, making them prime targets for vulnerabilities such as outdated software, misconfigurations, or exposed sensitive data.
Security Audits:
In security audits and penetration tests, subdomain enumeration is essential to gain a complete understanding of an organization’s attack surface. This comprehensive discovery helps auditors assess the security posture of a company, allowing them to find weak points and misconfigurations that may not be apparent in primary web applications.
Research:
For larger organizations, maintaining an accurate inventory of subdomains is critical for monitoring their web presence. Researchers can analyze these subdomains for potential risks or identify trends in how organizations structure their digital footprint. This data can be used for vulnerability research, compliance audits, or to track how a company’s online presence evolves over time
I compared the result with other website
WhoIsXMLAPI gives 10000 results.
DNSDumpster gives 23661 results
while Merklemaps result is 30000 
Even though it gives more results compared to other tools, it is the best you use multiple tools to gather more subdomains without any false positives.
To sum it up nicely; Merkle Map proves to be an effective tool, for streamlining the process of uncovering subdomains—a task for security enthusiasts and bug bounty hunters alike! By tapping into sources like DNS records and certificate transparency logs passively it swiftly reveals subdomains that could easily go unnoticed otherwise. This automated technique does not save a deal of time and energy compared to manual searches but also proves to be incredibly useful for bug bounty hunters on the hunt, for new vulnerabilities security pros conducting thorough audits and researchers putting together comprehensive lists of domains. Merkle Map is a tool, for web research due to its quickness and precision as well, as user friendly interface.
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