| name | exploiting-broken-link-hijacking |
| description | Discovers and exploits broken link hijacking by spidering a site (Burp Suite Spider, Scrapy, curl scraping), extracting referenced external scripts/domains, and checking DNS/CNAME records and domain registration status for expired or unclaimed resources an attacker could register. Use for subdomain takeover testing, supply-chain review of third-party scripts, or bug bounty hunting for hijackable external resources. |
| domain | cybersecurity |
| subdomain | web-application-security |
| tags | ["broken-link-hijacking","blh","subdomain-takeover","dead-link","expired-domain","supply-chain","external-resource"] |
| version | 1.0 |
| author | mahipal |
| license | Apache-2.0 |
| nist_csf | ["PR.PS-01","ID.RA-01","PR.DS-10","DE.CM-01"] |
| mitre_attack | ["T1190","T1059.007","T1505.003","T1083","T1195"] |
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
npx broken-link-checker http://target.com --recursive --ordered \
--exclude-internal --filter-level 3 -o broken_links.txt
curl -s http://target.com | grep -oP 'https?://[^"'"'"'\s>]+' | sort -u > all_links.txt
curl -s http://target.com | grep -oP 'src="[^"]*"' | grep -v target.com > external_scripts.txt
curl -s http://target.com | grep -oP 'href="[^"]*\.css"' | grep -v target.com > external_css.txt
curl -s "https://web.archive.org/web/timemap/link/http://target.com" | \
grep -oP 'https?://[^>]+' | sort -u > historical_links.txt
