Hello Ajak Amico, I Hope Everybody is fine, Many fail at bug bounty at the initial stage and drop out soon, so today I will share how to become a successful bug bounty hunter with my personal experience. this will be useful for every security researcher, especially beginners, People Watching this blog will have a different mindset whether you wanted to get a Hall of fame, or either a Bounty or at least a Valid bug. Now follow my way, you will get all three in one shot! so without wasting any time, let's get started.
.jpg)
- Stick With Basics
My first personal Experience is to stick with basics, I know many wanted to learn advanced bug bounty concepts, but Mastering basics such as OWASP top 10 will give you extreme confidence, and trust me I just applied for internships just by mastering my basics. and my personal experience I would say instead of practising in vulnerable applications, practise in Indian government sites and report it via NCIIPC because you would get a real-life hands-on practical and an appreciation mail too.
- Read Blogs and POCs’ Everyday
Now go out and ask any professional security researchers and the first thing they would say to get bounty is by reading blogs and watching POCs, this personally helped me to get many bounties and hall of fame, the thing you just need to take from this is the bug bounty tips and queries which is posted in blogs, that’s the reason I explain N number of bug bounty blogs via my Youtube channel. and just by watching my blogs and POCS, my many subscribers got bounties and Hall of Fames.
Bonus Tip: 😍
If you want blogs and POC with almost all vulnerabilities, watch this playlist fully, I have posted almost 70 Blogs and 25 POCs.
Publicly Disclosed Blogs: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjMPTVLsJk7l2WE9cpelqUWcLCpqrz-TG
POCs: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjMPTVLsJk7kQa4yMwWTR0iub-ZNPPBO6
- Understand How the Application Works
When I say this point, what I mention is here, Exploting Business logic flaws. once you know how all features work in your application, you can easily get stand out of the box from other security researchers. This method Helped me to get many bounties and Hall of Fames for me. To do so, you just need to test all functions manually and with the burp suite, this should be a part of recon. you can easily find bugs in the recon phase itself.
- Network and Communities:
As I already said in my last blog, have a Network In your area of domain, you can follow security researchers via Twitter, Instagram and you can ask doubts and their methodology and get bug bounty tips from them, and join Discord and Telegram communities to get bug bounty tips from other people, and if you have doubt you can post it there too! many people would help you if you find any difficulties in the bug bounty or escalation process, and finally, attend webinars and seminars all over the world, each has different knowledge and skillset which will help you in improving your bug bounty journey
- Stay Updated Everyday:
As you know, hacking is a daily learning process, Each and every day there would be new CVEs and zero-day exploits would be discovered, and it is important to know many new cve’s such as Log4j shell. You can follow this by following the hacker news Instagram handle and by following security researchers, the purpose of this point to mention here is while attending an interview, they would ask questions related to recent CVEs and Zerodays. If you want to find exploits for CVEs, you could either use Metasploit or Google hacking database (GHDB)
Conclusion:
Patience and consistency are Key! You can easily get valid bugs, but getting bounties will be a little difficult at the initial stage, for my it took 8months to get my first bounty, stay consistent, practise and learn every day you will become a successful bug bounty hunter soon if you liked this blog, just don't forget to press that follow button🙌. best wishes from Ajak Cybersecurity. ❤️
“கற்றவை பற்றவை🔥”
Learn Everyday, Happy Hacking 😁🙌