yulan.me All work
Personal · in progress 2026

Domain hygiene audit

A passive Certificate Transparency audit of my own domain.

What I did

As part of auditing my own domain’s security posture, I ran a passive Certificate Transparency query against yulan.me, pulling every certificate ever logged for the domain — a fully public and non-intrusive data source.

What came back

The query returned over 600 historical certificate records. The overwhelming majority had nothing to do with my own infrastructure: certificates issued, in bursts over many months, for subdomains carrying clear spam and pirated-content naming patterns — the kind of footprint left by an ad-arbitrage or SEO-spam operation exploiting a previous registration of the domain. Certificate Transparency logs are permanent and publicly auditable by design, so that record persists regardless of who owned the domain at the time.

Verification

Collection is trivial. The work was separating the one actionable line from the noise, and confirming the noise really was just noise.

I verified the finding with passive DNS lookups: none of the flagged subdomains currently resolve, and the zone carries no live wildcard record today. Cross-referencing issuance dates against my own ownership window showed a clean boundary — nothing matching the historical spam pattern has been issued since I acquired the domain, only routine automatic renewals from my own hosting setup.

The audit trail

  1. 01Queried the public logs. Certificate Transparency records pulled for a domain I own, passively and non-intrusively.
  2. 02600+ records surfaced. Historical certificates spanning several years.
  3. 03A pattern predating ownership. Spam issuance peaking months before I acquired the domain.
  4. 04Verified as inert. Passive DNS confirms no flagged subdomain resolves, and no live wildcard exists.
  5. 05The one action. Ongoing CT-log monitoring, so any future unexpected issuance is caught rather than discovered.