Bug Bounty Hunting

Bug Bounty Hunting Tips #5 — Aim to Become World-Class in Your Niche

March 28, 2020 By Craig Hays 2 Comments

Reading Time: 6 minutes

To earn more money from bug bounty programs, become the best in the world at one thing and ignore the rest. Here’s why.

bug bounty hunting tips aim to become world-class in your niche — Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

It’s very tempting to try to learn and apply everything there is to learn about different types of vulnerabilities. When you look at bug bounty writeups like those one hackerone.com, it is clear just how different are each of the reported vulnerabilities. When I first started looking into bug bounty programs, I thought I had to learn everything about everything in order to compete. That just isn’t true. In fact, it’s the opposite. If you want to do well with bug bounty programs, pick something you’re interested in and could spend thousands of hours looking at, and learn everything there is to know about it. Find your niche.

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Bug Bounty Tips #4, Covid-19 phishing, and more

March 16, 2020 By Craig Hays Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Craig’s Newsletter – March 16, 2020 Edition

Hi All!

Here’s a little update on what I’ve been doing since we last spoke.

What I’ve Been Writing

Since the last update I’ve published my 4th in a series of bug bounty hunting tips:
Bug Bounty Hunting Tips #4 — Develop a Process and Follow It. You can read it for free on craighays.com or if you’re a medium.com member you can support me by reading it there.

What I’ve Been Seeing

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Bug Bounty Hunting Tips #3 — Kicking S3 Buckets

February 22, 2018 By Craig Hays Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 4 minutes

There has been a lot of press recently about misconfigured Amazon S3 buckets leaking confidential information. The root cause of this is that in the past S3 buckets have been incredibly easy to misconfigure. Sometimes buckets are made web accessible by anyone. Other times buckets are web restricted but can be accessed through Amazon S3 API by any authorised user.

Due to the nature and number of these breaches, Amazon have recently released their Trusted Advisor service for S3 for free to everyone to try to crack down on the problem. The challenge now is getting people to look at the new output and make changes based on the feedback. In the meantime, let’s have some fun kicking over S3 buckets to see what bounties fall out.

Finding S3 Buckets

S3 buckets are all reachable via a web interface, whether access is permitted or not. The URL format is:

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Bug Bounty Hunting Tips #2 —Target their mobile apps (Android Edition)

February 9, 2018 By Craig Hays 1 Comment

Reading Time: 6 minutes

If you read through the disclosed bug bounty reports on platforms such as hackerone.com it is clear that most bug bounty hunters are targeting web applications and neglecting the mobile application landscape. This is an opportunity that you can take advantage of.

Android app bug bounty — Photo by LOLIONI on Unsplash

I’ve had a lot of success recently looking at mobile apps, specifically android applications. After searching online for decent training material I stumbled upon the Udemy course Android Application Penetration Testing which has proven invaluable. (Disclaimer, I get no financial gain or anything else out of linking to this course, other than more competition in the android bug bounty space.) 4.5 hours of training at 2x regular playback speed and you’re in a good starting position.

Just like web applications, you can find the OWASP Mobile Top 10 very useful for identifying vulnerabilities to look for. My personal favourites are:

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Bug Bounty Hunting Tips #1— Always Read the Source Code

November 21, 2017 By Craig Hays Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 3 minutes

One of the first things I do when approaching a target is to search for and read through all of their public source code repositories on sites like github.com looking at every file in every directory. I also check through the commit history to see what has changed with each commit. Yes this takes time to do it and it isn’t as fun as jumping straight into hacker typer mode fuzzing inputs on web applications and APIs but it is invaluable. Once I’ve finished the official code repositories of the target I then look at contributors to each of the projects and do the same thing for each of those. Developers often share a lot of code, config, SSH keys, usernames, and passwords between work and personal projects. This has the following benefits:

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