Download websites that use XAMPP

About XAMPP

Finding XAMPP answering on a public address means finding something in a place it was never built for. The bundle exists to give a developer a working web server, database, scripting runtime and mail stack on a laptop with almost no configuration, and its defaults are chosen for convenience rather than exposure: permissive settings, sample applications, administrative tools reachable without much resistance. Apache Friends has shipped it since 2002 under the GPL v2 license, built around a PHP stack, and the project has always been explicit that the result is a development environment.

As of October 2026 we see it answering on 16 sites. Every one of those is worth a second look, because reaching a development bundle from the open internet usually means one of a short list of stories: a workstation that got exposed and forgotten, a demo that quietly became permanent, a hosting account where somebody copied a local environment onto a server, or an appliance that shipped the bundle inside it and was never meant to face outward.

Version data supports that reading. Across the installations where a version string is visible at all, our fingerprint resolves a single value, 1.6.7, a build that predates by many years what the project ships now. Frozen version strings are what abandoned machines look like from outside. Nobody is patching these hosts, and the components underneath the bundle have moved a long way from whatever is still answering on them.

Detection is inferential and the count is a floor. A server identifies itself as the bundle only when a default page, a signature header or one of the shipped tools is left reachable, so a tidied installation is indistinguishable from a hand-assembled stack of the same components. The systems most carefully hidden are exactly the ones missing from the list.

Attack surface teams, hosting providers auditing their own estate, and researchers measuring how much unmaintained infrastructure is still online all need the same object, which is the domain list itself rather than a verdict on one hostname. Checking a single address tells you about that address. A downloadable set, joined against registrar, hosting and country data, tells you which providers carry the bulk of this exposure, whether it clusters in particular country domains or particular shared hosts, and how the population changes between exports, which is the only measurement that settles an argument about whether the problem is shrinking or simply moving somewhere else.