Download websites that use SimpleHTTP

About SimpleHTTP

Most software in our catalogue was chosen by somebody. SimpleHTTP usually was not. The module ships inside Python and exists so that a developer can serve a folder over HTTP with a single command while building something else, and when a request from the public internet gets an answer from it, the ordinary explanation is that a process meant for a laptop or a staging box ended up facing outward.

Presence here therefore means something different from presence anywhere else in our data. A hit is not a purchase decision or a framework preference. A hit is an exposure. The server offers no authentication, no access control worth the name, and by default it will list a directory and hand over whatever happens to be sitting in it. Some of those hosts are deliberate, serving a package index or a static file drop where nothing sensitive lives. Others are forgotten processes that nobody has looked at in months. The code traces back to 1991 and is distributed as Open Source software inside a standard library, which is part of why it appears in unexpected places. Nothing has to be installed, nothing appears in a dependency file, and nothing bills anybody.

The audience for a list like this is not a marketing team. Attack surface vendors, penetration testers scoping an engagement, national incident response teams and researchers measuring how misconfiguration spreads all want the same thing, which is every host currently answering this way, not a check on one domain they already suspect. As of October 2026 we see it on 633 sites, and the population turns over quickly, because a process like this tends to get noticed and shut down.

Identification comes from the server banner, and the caveat follows directly from that. A banner is self reported text. Anyone can change it, a reverse proxy in front of the host will usually replace it, and a host behind a CDN shows the CDN instead. The list therefore contains the hosts that announce themselves, which is a subset of the hosts actually running the module, and the error runs in one direction only. Version data offers no help either. The only version string we record is 0.6, which reflects the protocol library rather than the interpreter, so it cannot be used to date a host or to judge whether anything is patched.

Cross referencing is where the file earns its place. Sorting by TLD shows whether exposure clusters on university, government or corporate suffixes. Matching the list against domains your organisation owns turns it into a perimeter check that nobody had to run by hand. Watching it across releases shows whether a sector is cleaning up or drifting. A lookup box answers none of those, because the entire point is finding the hosts you did not know to ask about.