dnsenum
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Multithreaded Perl script that enumerates DNS information of a domain and discovers non-contiguous IP blocks.
Summary
dnsenum is an open-source command-line tool, written in Perl, that enumerates a domain's DNS information and maps out its non-contiguous IP blocks. It runs as a script you invoke from a terminal, threading lookups for A, NS and MX records, attempting zone transfers against each nameserver to grab the BIND version, scraping Google for extra subdomains, brute-forcing hostnames from a wordlist, and running whois and reverse lookups across the resulting netranges. That mix of passive and active recon makes it a fit for penetration testers and OSINTOSINTOpen-source intelligence, collecting and analyzing information from publicly available sources. Investigators use it to learn about people, infrastructure or threats.-minded red teamers mapping a target's DNS footprint before deeper enumeration. It sits in the same reconnaissance space as other DNS enumeration utilities bundled with Kali Linux, where it has long been mainlined. Development is quiet: first committed in 2014, 11 contributors, no commits in the past year, and the last release was over two years ago, so treat it as stable but effectively unmaintained.
Multithreaded Perl script that enumerates DNS information of a domain and discovers non-contiguous IP blocks.
How dnsenum helps
What are all the nameservers and mail exchangers a target domain actually uses?
resolves and lists the A, NS and MX records for the domain up front, threading the lookups so the full set comes back in one pass
Will a misconfigured nameserver hand over the whole zone to a stranger?
attempts an axfr transfer against each nameserver in turn, and where one succeeds it pulls the zone data and the BIND version along with it
Which subdomains of a target exist that were never in my wordlist?
scrapes Google with a site-restricted query to surface extra hostnames indexed publicly, supplementing whatever the brute-force pass finds
What hostnames exist under this domain that I don't already know about?
brute-forces names from a supplied wordlist, threading the guesses and recursing into any subdomain that itself returns an NS record
Languages
Command line
No command matches.
| option | found in | since | description |
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Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for dnsenum, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail dnsenum puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
Nothing shipped since we started watching. Releases and docs updates land here as they happen.
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in SparrowOchon/dnsenum2, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 0 ±0 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 0 +0 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 0 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 100% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close not measured issues closed, last 12 months
- Open backlog 2 of 4 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 2
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 47
- other 100%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
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