I still remember my early days in the bug bounty scene—I honestly thought I was the next Elliot Alderson. I was poking around a massive e-commerce platform (let’s call it testCompany) when I spotted a classic: a URL parameter like ?id=123.
I told myself, "Sedat, this is it. This is the big one." I immediately threw a single quote in there, and the page spit out an error. My eyes literally lit up. I stayed up until sunrise, firing up SQLMap in the background and cycling through a thousand different payloads. I was so convinced I was about to dump the entire admin database that I started drafting the report in my head.
The reality check? That error message wasn't coming from the database; it was just a custom exception handler from the framework. There was no vulnerability. None. By dawn, I hadn't just lost a night of sleep; I’d also managed to get my IP blacklisted by their WAF (Web Application Firewall). That night taught me a hard lesson: bug bounty isn’t just about "finding bugs"—it’s about actually understanding the system and having the patience to play the long game.
Recon: Finding the Needle or Burning the Haystack?
Everyone in this game talks about "Recon" like it’s some magic spell. Most people think it just means running a subdomain list and calling it a day. But look, if you’re looking exactly where everyone else is looking, you’re just going to get hit with the "Duplicate" hammer. Our job is to find the dusty, forgotten corners that developers assumed no one would ever stumble upon.
Instead of just running subfinder and walking away, you need to actually probe those subdomains to see what’s breathing. One of my go-to "let's see what we've got" commands is:
subfinder -d testCompany.com -silent | httpx -title -tech-detect -status-code
This doesn't just tell you a domain is alive; it tells you what’s running under the hood. If I see something like PHP 5.4 or Jira 7.x, that’s when the fun starts. But the real gold? It’s usually buried inside JavaScript files. You wouldn’t believe the stuff developers leave in there—API endpoints, hardcoded test credentials, or internal routing logic that makes you do a double-take.
Using tools like LinkFinder to scan these files is a total lifesaver. I once found a path to a company’s internal staging environment just by reading a comment left in a JS file. Remember, the biggest vulnerabilities are often hiding in plain sight, right where everyone else is too lazy to look.
The Payload Dance and the WAF Trap
The moment you feel like you’ve found something—maybe a potential XSS or an SQLi—your instinct is to go big. But if you start firing off alert(1) or union select immediately, you’re basically asking the WAF to kick you out. Modern systems are way too smart for the "script alert" days. We have to be more... elegant.
Say you find an input field where <script> tags are blocked. Don't give up. This is where you lean into HTML5 features. Try something like this:
<details open ontoggle="confirm(document.domain)">
Or, if things get really tight, I’m a huge fan of embedding payloads inside SVG files. It's often the "quiet" approach that bypasses the filters while everyone else is busy banging their heads against a wall with noisy payloads.
In this field, the difference between a "Bounty Paid" and an "N/A" is often just one extra hour of research. Keep digging, keep your payloads stealthy, and for the love of God, don't get your IP banned in the first five minutes. Happy hunting, mate!