Most bug bounty hunters are still running subdomain recon the slow way — and it's costing them time on every scan.
I recently tested subfaster, a speed-focused fork of the widely used subfinder tool, against real bounty scopes spanning 40+ apex domains. The performance difference was significant enough that it's now part of my regular recon workflow.
What Changed Under the Hood
Startup time drops from roughly 1 second down to about 30 milliseconds, since the blocking update-check call that slows down every subfinder run has been removed by default.
HTTP keep-alive means connections get reused instead of opening a fresh handshake per request, cutting lookup time nearly in half on sources that paginate heavily.
Preflight probing on block-prone sources means the tool bails out in seconds if your IP is rate-limited, instead of hanging the entire scan to the full timeout.
Output is silent and alphabetically sorted by default, built specifically for piping straight into tools like httpx and nuclei in an automated recon pipeline.
Why It Matters
For anyone doing external attack surface mapping, bug bounty reconnaissance, penetration testing, or OSINT investigation, these aren't cosmetic changes. They compound fast across hundreds of scans, especially when working against large, multi-domain scopes under time pressure.
In my full write-up, I cover:
- Complete installation process (Go 1.24+ required)
- Real commands with explanations of when and why to use each one
- A live bug bounty case study running subfaster against a 40-domain scope
- An honest comparison against the original subfinder, including where this newer fork still falls short — smaller default source set, no built-in rate limiting
Whether you're a bug bounty hunter, a pentester mapping external attack surface, a red teamer automating recon pipelines, or a SOC analyst tracking your organization's exposed footprint, this is worth adding to your toolkit evaluation list.
Full hands-on review with installation steps, command breakdowns, and the bug bounty case study here:
https://www.xpert4cyber.com/2026/08/subfaster-review-subfinder-fork-subdomain-enumeration.html
