Bug Bounty Hunting Essentials: Quick-paced guide to help white-hat hackers get through bug bounty programs

HackerOne is a vulnerability collaboration and bug bounty hunting platform that connects companies with hackers. It was one of the first start-ups to commercialize and utilize crowd-sourced security and hackers as a part of its business model, and is the biggest cybersecurity firm of its kind.

Bugcrowd Inc. is a company that develops a coordination platform that connects businesses with researchers so as to test their applications. It offers testing solutions for web, mobile, source code, and client-side applications.

Cobalt's Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) platform converts broken pentest models into a data-driven vulnerability co-ordination engine. Cobalt's crowdsourced SaaS platform delivers results that help agile teams to pinpoint, track, and remediate vulnerabilities.

Synack is an American technology company based in Redwood City, California. Synack's business includes a vulnerability intelligence platform that automates the discovery of exploitable vulnerabilities for reconnaissance and turns them over to the company's freelance hackers to create vulnerability reports for clients.

A public bug bounty program is one that is open to anyone who wants to participate. This program may prohibit some researchers from participating based on the researcher's level and track record, but in general, anyone can participate in a public bounty program and this includes the scope, the rules of engagement, as well as the bounty guidelines. A public program is accessible by all researchers on the platform, and all bug bounty programs outside of the platforms are also considered bug bounty programs.

A private bug bounty program is one that is an invite-only program for selected researchers. This is a program that allows only a few researchers to participate and the researchers are invited based on their skill level and statistics. Private programs only select those researchers who are skilled in testing the kinds of applications that they have. The programs tend to go public after a certain amount of time but some of them may never go public at all. These programs provide access only to those researchers that have a strong track record of reporting good vulnerabilities, so to be invited to good programs, it is required to have a strong and positive record.

There are a few differences between a public and private program. Conventionally, programs tend to start as private and over time evolve into the public. This is not always true but, mostly, businesses start a private bug bounty program and invite a group of researchers that test their apps before the program goes public to the community. Companies usually consider a few factors before they start a public program. There has to be a defined testing timeline and it is advised that companies initially work with researchers who specialize in that particular area to identify the flaws and vulnerabilities.

Most of the time, the companies do not open their programs to the public and limit the scope of testing as well so as to allow researchers to test these applications specifically in the sections that are critical. This reduces the number of low-severity vulnerabilities in out-of-scope applications. Many organizations use this technique to verify their security posture. Many researchers hunt for bugs in applications mainly for financial gain, so it is crucial that the organization outlines their payout structure within the program's scope. There are a few questions before anyone would want to start to participate in a bug bounty program; the most important one is What is the end goal of the program going public versus keeping it private?

The first thing you can observe in a researcher's profile is how many vulnerabilities the researcher has reported in his bug bounty hunting career. This indicated how much the researcher is active on the platform and how many vulnerabilities he has reported to date. A high number of reported vulnerabilities does not usually mean that the researcher has a positive track record and is relative to different factors. That is, if the researcher has 1,000 vulnerabilities submitted over a period of 1 year, the researcher is quite active.

This is the number of programs to which the researcher has reported positive vulnerabilities to. The number of halls of fame is the number of programs the researcher participated in and had valid reports in those programs. A high number of programs means the level of participation of the researcher is active. That is, if the researcher has 150 halls of fame out of a total of 170 programs, the researcher is successful.

This is a relatively new indicator and it differs from platform to platform. Reputation points are points awarded for valid reports. It is a combination of the severity of the report, the bounty awarded to the report, and the bonus bounty of the report. That is, if the researcher has 8,000 reputation points over time, then he is above average.

A signal is an aggregate representation of report validity. It is basically a point-based system that represents how many invalid reports the researcher has submitted. A signal is calculated out of 10.

Impact is a representation of the average bounty awarded per report. It is an aggregate of the total bounty that was awarded for every report that was filed.

This is a percent-based system that indicates the number of accepted reports divided by the number of total reports. This tells the program owners how much success rate the researcher has in reporting vulnerabilities. If researcher A has 91% accuracy rate, he submits reports that are mostly valid.

There are many books available online to guide and help you in learning the basics and fundamentals of penetration testing and bug hunting. As bug bounties generally are about to comprise website targets, it is advised to start with website hacking and then move forward. It is essential to focus on the interesting and exciting area of hacking.

At the time of learning, it is crucial that you understand and retain whatever you learn. Practice what you have learned in real time. Vulnerable applications and systems are great ways to test your skill set in virtual environments. This will also provide you with an estimate of what you are going to contribute in the real world.

Following the tips, by now you may have acquired a brief understanding of how to look for and deal with security vulnerabilities. So, the next step is to check what other bug bounty hunters are finding out and working on. Fortunately, the security community is pretty generous in sharing knowledge and a list of write-ups and tutorials is available to enhance your understanding. This can be done by viewing reports.

By time you read POCs, you are almost about to start bug bounty hunting. But to start off with bug bounty hunting, you need to learn how the bug bounties work and how to get started with the procedure. This is done in order to assure and maximize the chances of success. Here are some resources that you can learn from:

When you are new or at a beginner level, then it is suggested not to try to hack the most public and common bugs. If you start off with hacking Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and other popular platforms, it is likely that you will end up frustrated because these sites are secure, as they have received and resolved many bug reports. Instead of targeting such sites, try to focus on the bounties that go ignored and unnoticed by other hackers and hunters.

The most exciting thing about hacking is that it is a long journey of learning. There is always something new and interesting going around about hacking. A number of new articles and presentations are always available to learn from. There are many interesting people and experts to meet at conferences which, creates more opportunities to pursue in this field.

Targeting a bug is not a matter of luck. Instead, it is considered to be a matter of skills and luck. Don't waste time on finding the already reported bugs. Otherwise, you may end up being depressed by the duplication. It is suggested to spend time on understanding the functionality of the application. Also, try making notes and have a track of suspicious endpoints. You are not going to earn a satisfactory amount for the known issues if you are too early or the first one to report. If you get to know about a program within 10 to 12 hours of its launch, don't waste your time in looking for the issues at the surface level; rather, take a deep dive into the application.

If you are inspecting for vulnerabilities such as CSRF, XSS, subdomains, and so on, then you may end up getting several duplicates or not getting any bug at all. It is suggested to first check their documentation and then understand the functionalities and privileges of target users.

Don't expect any specific reward after reporting the bug. So, whenever you report a bug, close the report and start looking for other bugs and vulnerabilities. Develop a mindset of hunting bugs instead of hunting bugs in a matter of hours.

A pretty common scenario is that a lot of new bounty hunters just start searching for bugs without having a basic knowledge of how things work. As far as my personal experience is concerned, you will not get to know how an application works and the flow of the application until and unless you know how it is built. It is vital to know how the application is built in a programming language before you start breaking it.

In order to automate your vulnerabilities, you need to learn scripting and learning a programming language is highly recommended. JS, Python, Ruby, Bash, and so on. are some of the best scripting languages that even know some curl tricks for basic bash commands scripting.

It is saddening when a bug hunter receives no bounty. However, getting no bounty adds to experience and knowledge. You can always take bug bounty hunting in a positive way and motivate yourself.

Whenever you identify a vulnerability, the foremost question should be, what security impact is the bug going to make on the application? You can either start hunting with the goal of finding a bug or you can start hunting with a vision of looking for the best impact in the application. The former vision is an isolated one, whereas, the latter upholds a wider point of view.