Comment by toomuchtodo
9 hours ago
When I engage a security assessor on behalf of a client, I am required to provide detailed scope and attest to in scope assets (including IP blocks and public hostnames), as well as that I have legal authority for them to be tested. This is validated by my executive sponsor.
It is your responsibility to do your due diligence as a security researcher versus “spray and pray” to ensure you are not exceeding the scope beyond your intended target.
Dump the subdomains, resolve them, and review where they resolve to in order to understand the footprint and attack surface boundaries before engaging scanning or agentic red team harnesses. Automate as much as possible for building the state graph of the target, but a human must remain in the loop to sanity check. To not do this means you could be attacking hyperscaler object storage, a CDN, a partner SaaS frontend, ticketing systems, mail systems, etc (ie anything someone may CNAME off the root domain but that is outside of their organization’s control).
I reckon there's a decent argument to be made that an authorization to scan *.tesla.com definitively does NOT extend to any hosts resolved via a CNAME chain that goes foo.tesla.com -> bah.not-tesla.com -> host-that-never-authorized-attacking.
Pretty hard to implement in practice!
% dig www.tesla.com +short
www.tesla.com.edgekey.net.
e1792.dscx.akamaiedge.net.
<akamai IP>