Exploiting Broken Link Hijacking

When to Use

• When auditing web applications for references to expired or unclaimed external resources
• During supply chain security assessments of third-party script and resource dependencies
• When testing for subdomain takeover opportunities via dangling CNAME records
• During bug bounty hunting for broken link hijacking vulnerabilities
• When assessing the security of external resource dependencies in production applications

Prerequisites

• Web crawler or spider for discovering all external links (Burp Suite Spider, Scrapy)
• DNS lookup tools for checking CNAME records and domain availability
• Domain registrar access for claiming expired domains (as proof of concept)
• Understanding of CDN and cloud service provisioning (S3, Azure Blob, GitHub Pages)
• blc (broken-link-checker) or similar tool for automated link validation
• Knowledge of services vulnerable to subdomain takeover (can-i-take-over-xyz)

Legal Notice: This skill is for authorized security testing and educational purposes only. Unauthorized use against systems you do not own or have written permission to test is illegal and may violate computer fraud laws.

Workflow

Step 1 — Crawl and Extract All External References

# Use broken-link-checker to find dead links
npx broken-link-checker http://target.com --recursive --ordered \
  --exclude-internal --filter-level 3 -o broken_links.txt

# Extract all external links from page source
curl -s http://target.com | grep -oP 'https?://[^"'"'"'\s>]+' | sort -u > all_links.txt

# Extract JavaScript sources
curl -s http://target.com | grep -oP 'src="[^"]*"' | grep -v target.com > external_scripts.txt

# Extract CSS references
curl -s http://target.com | grep -oP 'href="[^"]*\.css"' | grep -v target.com > external_css.txt

# Use wayback machine for historical external references
curl -s "https://web.archive.org/web/timemap/link/http://target.com" | \
  grep -oP 'https?://[^>]+' | sort -u > historical_links.txt

# Spider with Burp Suite
# Configure Spider scope to include target.com
# Review Site Map > Filter by "External" to list all external references

Step 2 — Identify Dead or Claimable Resources

# Check if external domains are registered
for domain in $(cat external_domains.txt); do
  whois $domain 2>/dev/null | grep -qi "no match\|not found\|available" && \
    echo "[CLAIMABLE] $domain"
done

# Check HTTP status of external links
while read url; do
  status=$(curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{http_code}" "$url" --max-time 5)
  if [ "$status" = "000" ] || [ "$status" = "404" ]; then
    echo "[DEAD] $url (Status: $status)"
  fi
done < all_links.txt

# Check for dangling CNAME records
for sub in $(cat subdomains.txt); do
  cname=$(dig +short CNAME $sub)
  if [ -n "$cname" ]; then
    resolved=$(dig +short $cname)
    if [ -z "$resolved" ]; then
      echo "[DANGLING] $sub -> $cname (UNRESOLVED)"
    fi
  fi
done

# Check cloud resource availability
# AWS S3 bucket
aws s3 ls s3://target-assets 2>&1 | grep -q "NoSuchBucket" && echo "[CLAIMABLE] S3: target-assets"

Step 3 — Check Service-Specific Takeover Possibilities

# Check GitHub Pages takeover
# If CNAME points to <user>.github.io and 404 is returned
curl -s https://subdomain.target.com | grep -q "There isn't a GitHub Pages site here"

# Check AWS S3 takeover
curl -s http://subdomain.target.com | grep -q "NoSuchBucket"

# Check Azure Blob Storage
curl -s http://subdomain.target.com | grep -q "The specified container does not exist"

# Check Heroku
curl -s http://subdomain.target.com | grep -q "No such app"

# Check Shopify
curl -s http://subdomain.target.com | grep -q "Sorry, this shop is currently unavailable"

# Use subjack for automated takeover detection
subjack -w subdomains.txt -c fingerprints.json -t 100 -o takeover_candidates.txt

# Use nuclei takeover templates
subfinder -d target.com -silent | nuclei -t http/takeovers/ -o takeovers.txt

Step 4 — Verify External Script Hijacking

# Check if external JavaScript domains are available for registration
curl -s http://target.com | grep -oP 'src="https?://([^/"]+)' | \
  cut -d'/' -f3 | sort -u | while read domain; do
    whois "$domain" 2>/dev/null | grep -qi "no match\|available" && \
      echo "[HIJACKABLE SCRIPT] $domain loaded by target.com"
  done

# Check npm/CDN package references
curl -s http://target.com | grep -oP 'unpkg\.com/[^@/]+' | sort -u

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