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

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

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.

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.

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.