bug bounty hunting tips series

Bug Bounty Hunting Tips #6 — Simplify

May 11, 2020 By Craig Hays Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Apply Occam’s razor to your bug bounty hunting. Cutaway all that is unnecessary. Reduce to the essential. Simplify to what is important and ignore the rest.

On the surface, the web is a complicated place. For bug bounty hunters, most of it is just noise. A distraction from what is truly important. If you’re fuzzing inputs with an automated or semi-automated scanner, the more inputs and effective payloads you have to play with the more likely you are to find a bug. Otherwise, aim to simplify everything and manually test what remains.

Why You Should Simplify Requests When Bug Bounty Hunting

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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 Hunting Tips #4 — Develop a Process and Follow It

March 12, 2020 By Craig Hays Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The easiest way to fail as a bug bounty hunter is to search at random without a methodology or process to follow. Here’s what to consider.

Photo by Mark Fletcher-Brown on Unsplash

It is really easy to jump straight in and wildly throw payloads at a system when you first approach a target. Admittedly, it can feel great for the first hour or so but after that, you can start to become bored and frustrated if you don’t find anything. And without a structured bug bounty hunting process, you probably won’t find anything new.

It is important to develop and follow your own testing process in order to test thoroughly and professionally. When you first start out your process will be weak and immature but you’ll develop and improve upon it the more bug bounty hunting you do. If you do this consciously you’ll have greater results.

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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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