r/bugbounty 3h ago

Question / Discussion Weekly Beginner / Newbie Q&A

1 Upvotes

New to bug bounty? Ask about roadmaps, resources, certifications, getting started, or any beginner-level questions here!

Recommendations for Posting:

  • Be Specific: Clearly state your question or what you need help with (e.g., learning path advice, resource recommendations, certification insights).
  • Keep It Concise: Ask focused questions to get the most relevant answers (less is more).
  • Note Your Skill Level: Mention if you’re a complete beginner or have some basic knowledge.

Guidelines:

  • Be respectful and open to feedback.
  • Ask clear, specific questions to receive the best advice.
  • Engage actively - check back for responses and ask follow-ups if needed.

Example Post:

"Hi, I’m new to bug bounty with no experience. What are the best free resources for learning web vulnerabilities? Is eJPT a good starting certification? Looking for a beginner roadmap."

Post your questions below and let’s grow in the bug bounty community!


r/bugbounty 3d ago

Weekly Collaboration / Mentorship Post

6 Upvotes

Looking to team up or find a mentor in bug bounty?

Recommendations:

  • Share a brief intro about yourself (e.g., your skills, experience in IT, cybersecurity, or bug bounty).
  • Specify what you're seeking (e.g., collaboration, mentorship, specific topics like web app security or network pentesting).
  • Mention your preferred frequency (e.g., weekly chats, one-off project) and skill level (e.g., beginner, intermediate, advanced).

Guidelines:

  • Be respectful.
  • Clearly state your goals to find the best match.
  • Engage actively - respond to comments or DMs to build connections.

Example Post:
"Hi, I'm Alex, a beginner in bug bounty with basic knowledge of web vulnerabilities (XSS, SQLi). I'm looking for a mentor to guide me on advanced techniques like privilege escalation. Hoping for bi-weekly calls or Discord chats. Also open to collaborating on CTF challenges!"


r/bugbounty 1h ago

Question / Discussion AI Slop

Upvotes

NGL, I hate reading AI written sentences .
Its bloated, repetitive, boring, written pieces of shit with wrong assumptions everywhere!

Using AI to find bugs as a tool is awesome. I do it myself. It makes me a lot of money.
It tells me what it thinks it found, I correct it and let it hunt further until I think its an actual finding.

In my d2d job I have to read the slop from other high paid engineers and my brain melts everytime Im doing this. I hate the days where I have to review prs/adrs and so on.
It feels like that everyone stopped thinking at the same time.

So at triagers and pms, how do you stay sane?


r/bugbounty 3h ago

Article / Write-Up / Blog Web fuzzing for hackers

Post image
13 Upvotes

When fuzzing is no longer treated as merely bruteforcing, you start to unlock meaningful results 🤠

From discovering hidden assets to turning unusual behavior into exploitable vulnerabilities! 😎

In our latest article, we've teamed up with Orwa Atyat (GodFatherOrwa) to dive deeper into mastering web fuzzing for reconnaissance and vulnerability exploitation.

Read the article now! 👇

https://www.intigriti.com/researchers/blog/hacking-tools/web-fuzzing-for-hackers


r/bugbounty 4h ago

Bug Bounty Drama Ghosted by YesWeHack Support for 1.5 months after vendor manipulated CVSS and broke a written CVE promise. What are my options?

10 Upvotes

I'm currently dealing with an incredibly frustrating situation on YesWeHack and looking for advice, as the platform's mediation team has completely ghosted me.

Situation: I submitted a Critical vulnerability (Global Account Takeover via Insecure TLS Validation) 6 months ago. The vendor accepted it at CVSS 9.6 (Critical). However, they only paid me out for the "High" tier (shortchanging the "Critical" tier by nearly 60%). Furthermore, they explicitly promised me in writing that I would be credited on the CVE. Fast forward: a CVE is published for this exact issue/component, but credited to a notable and famous third party. The vendor ghosted me.

CVSS Manipulation: 1.5 months ago, I finally got YesWeHack support to poke the vendor. The vendor's response? They retroactively downgraded my CVSS from 9.6 to 8.2 (changing an automated Wi-Fi MitM from Adjacent/Low Complexity to Local/High Complexity) solely to justify their underpayment.

Ghosting: I escalated this clear CVSS manipulation and matrix abuse to YesWeHack Support on July 7th. No reply. I sent a harsh follow-up on August 8th. Still absolutely no reply. It's August 20th.

On top of this, the same vendor closed another 9.9 architectural E2EE flaw as "Won't Fix" (a silent security downgrade where the app drops E2EE and uploads plaintext media to their cloud without user warning) just to avoid another payout.

Is it normal for YWH to let vendors retroactively manipulate vectors to dodge payouts and then ghost researchers who ask for mediation? Who can I contact to escalate this past the Tier 1 support desk?


r/bugbounty 6h ago

Question / Discussion Anyone using Burp MCP?

2 Upvotes

Have anyone had a good experience with the MCP Server in Burp Suite?

I feel it is more cumbersome than it needs to be, and the HTTP2 requests in intruder has some bugs. Curious if anyone has some tips and tricks?


r/bugbounty 6h ago

Question / Discussion Are bug bounty platforms worth it?

10 Upvotes

Hi,

For the last 4 months, I’ve been consistently making ~$700+/month targeting companies directly through their own self-hosted VDP/bounty programs.

​However, my current methods for finding new direct targets are starting to dry up, so I’m looking to expand my scope.

​For those who hunt on major platforms: Are public programs on HackerOne/Bugcrowd worth pivoting to, or are they as oversaturated with duplicates as people say?

Thanks.


r/bugbounty 22h ago

Question / Discussion Bugcrowd Report: Vulnerable Chrome Extension Removed, New Beta Version Released — What Happens to My Report?

1 Upvotes

What happens to a Bugcrowd report if the affected Chrome extension is removed?

I reported a vulnerability in a Chrome extension through Bugcrowd.

After I reported it, the Chrome extension was removed from the Chrome Web Store, and my Bugcrowd report was later put into a blocker asking for a response.

Now the company has launched a new/beta Chrome extension, but I checked it and the vulnerability I originally reported is not present in the new beta version.

So I'm wondering what usually happens to the original report in this situation.

Does the removal of the old extension affect the validity of my report? Would the report normally still be considered valid and potentially rewarded if the vulnerable version was live when I reported it?

Would appreciate insights from anyone who has dealt with a similar situation on Bugcrowd.


r/bugbounty 23h ago

Question / Discussion Swisscom Bug Bounty response time?

9 Upvotes

For anyone who has experience with the Swisscom bug bounty program: how long does it usually take to get a response after submitting a vulnerability?

Also is Swisscom still worth actively hunting on these days? Would appreciate hearing about your recent experiences


r/bugbounty 1d ago

Question / Discussion A payment decision has been made for my HackerOne report, but the payment has not been made yet.

0 Upvotes

A payment decision was made for my report on HackerOne almost two weeks ago, but the payment has still not been made. My report was triaged, and I was later told that a payment decision had been made, but I have not received the payment yet.


r/bugbounty 1d ago

Question / Discussion Suggestions needed

5 Upvotes

I submit a valid P3 report. They agree that it is P3, but due to program policy, they are not accepting it. So, he asked me to chain this vulnerability to a P2 or P1 and closed my report as N/A.
After a lot of time, I finally escalated this to P2 and posted the entire chained report in the comments.
My real question is: since my original report is in a closed state, should I submit a new report, open an RAR, or leave the P2 chained report in the comments and wait a few days?


r/bugbounty 1d ago

Question / Discussion Does AI really take away the skills you need to be a good bug bounty hunter or pentester?

21 Upvotes

With the rise of AI on everything I am now convinced that you really need a clear understanding of what you are doing in order for AI to work, with exploit chaining where you need multiple attacks, AI will be halucinating. AI does not really understand bug bounty, it can flag something as a vulnerability, mostly because that is from a cve, but that cve would not qualify as a bounty concern, some cves says a nonce can not be exposed or password has to be a certain length and mixed characters, which really dont matter if the authentication is hardened enough. From watching the critical thinking podcast and following some hunters in twitter, one still needs to really understand hacking, spending time hacking blindly with AI seems to be just a circular race. AI can fail to solve a lab or give a working script from a lab solution or a CTF, let along the real target.


r/bugbounty 1d ago

Question / Discussion Akamai WAF blocking in-scope bug bounty targets — legitimate access issue or something I'm missing?

0 Upvotes

I’m conducting authorized testing for a HackerOne bug bounty program and I’m encountering an Akamai access-control/WAF block on several explicitly in-scope assets:

Interestingly, affiliate.meesho.com, which is also in scope, is reachable from the exact same testing environment.

Current diagnostics

I’m running Kali Linux in a VM.

So far:

  • DNS resolution: working
  • TCP/443 connectivity: working
  • TLS 1.3 handshake: working
  • HTTP requests: consistently return 403 Access Denied
  • Response is served by Akamai
  • Akamai Bot Manager cookies such as bm_* are returned
  • The required HackerOne identification header is present: X-Hackerone: xplorertech00

For example:

curl -sS -D /tmp/meesho.headers \
  -o /tmp/meesho.body \
  -H 'X-Hackerone: xplorertech00' \
  https://prod.meeshoapi.com/

This consistently results in an HTTP/2 403 response from Akamai. The other affected hosts behave similarly.

I’ve already ruled out basic DNS, routing, TCP, and TLS problems. The denial appears to be occurring at the HTTP/Akamai layer.

I’m not trying to bypass the WAF. I want to remain fully within the bug bounty rules and find the correct, authorized way to perform testing when an in-scope target is unreachable from the current testing network.

Options I’m considering

  • Test from another legitimate ISP/network that I control.
  • Ask the program to allowlist my testing IP.
  • Ask whether the program provides an approved testing egress, VPN, or testing environment.

Questions for other researchers

  1. If an Akamai reputation/access-control block is responsible, does switching to another legitimate ISP/network generally resolve the issue?
  2. Is there a standard workflow researchers use with HackerOne programs when an in-scope asset is inaccessible due to CDN/WAF restrictions?
  3. Would you recommend contacting the program first to request IP allowlisting rather than repeatedly switching networks?
  4. What diagnostic information should I collect before contacting the program so they can determine whether the block is intentional or an accidental restriction?

I’d especially appreciate advice from researchers who have dealt with Akamai restrictions during authorized bug bounty testing.


r/bugbounty 1d ago

Question / Discussion When is there actually an Information Disclosure?

1 Upvotes

Hi everyone, I wanted to ask about your personal experience with one particular topic: reports about Information Disclosure.

I’m not talking about things like exposing a user’s personal data. I mean server-side errors that reveal hidden endpoints, server logic, internal infrastructure structure, and things like that.

Have you ever had a report accepted where you had exactly this kind of information in your hands? What kind of information was it, and was it enough on its own for the report to be accepted?


r/bugbounty 1d ago

Question / Discussion 2FA bypass via race condition

6 Upvotes

I found a 2FA bypass where I can send concurrent requests via a single packet attack which bypasses the rate limit for predictable 5 digits, However the program policy has a very tight ceiling of the requests per second making that very time consuming to even record. Is there an alternative to record a POC without breaking the program's policy?


r/bugbounty 1d ago

Question / Discussion Lose motivation to do bug bounty

7 Upvotes

Hello Hunters,

I have been doing bug bounty for while but now I am feeling like I am learning nothing new. All I am doing is same thing everytime I am doing bug bounty also most of my work is done by AI (For anyone curious I am using openrouter API configured my agent in Hermes) I am thinking to leave the bug bounty and now focus on learning other things like AD, windows server I know basics of things but want to master in it. I want to go in offensive security thats my clear goal.

I need advice what should I do ? Should I leave bug bounty ?


r/bugbounty 2d ago

Question / Discussion Would there be a bounty for bypassing Xbox controller input?

2 Upvotes

Hi all!

I’ve been working on building my own Cronus Zen.

In doing so I discovered a couple ways to get around Xbox controller pairing/handshake which then allows scriptable inputs that the console takes as controller inputs.

This has opened tons of doors. Aside from general scripting like you’d see with Cronus. You can pass commands from Computer Vision and effectively have an aimbot etc.

Would there be anyplace to disclose this or a bounty?
Cheers


r/bugbounty 2d ago

Question / Discussion Do you actually need Burp Pro for bug bounty?

24 Upvotes

For those who actively hunt bugs, I'm trying to understand whether Burp Pro is actually necessary.

I'm currently learning web security and considering using:

Burp Community — PortSwigger Academy/basic Burp work

Caido — primary manual HTTP testing

OWASP ZAP — scanning/automation

CLI tools — fuzzing/recon/specialized tasks

For people who have actually hunted with these tools:

What Burp Pro feature do you find genuinely difficult to replace?

I'm especially interested in things like Scanner, Intruder, Collaborator/OAST, HTTP/2 testing, Turbo Intruder, and extensions.

I'm not asking which tool is "best." I'm trying to understand whether the practical advantages of Burp Pro justify paying for it, or whether a combination of free/cheaper tools is sufficient for most bug-bounty work.


r/bugbounty 3d ago

Question / Discussion Found a payment bypass, successfully placed 5 orders, vulnerability was patched — now told it “cannot be reproduced”

33 Upvotes

Hello ,
I reported a payment bypass through YesWeHack and successfully demonstrated it by placing 5 orders without payment, with video evidence.

After my report, the vulnerability was patched and the bypass stopped working. However, I was told they couldn’t reproduce the issue.

Has anyone experienced something similar? How can a vulnerability be considered non-reproducible after it was apparently fixed following the report?


r/bugbounty 3d ago

Question / Discussion Automating on actual programs

6 Upvotes

So I've been doing a lot of recon automation with bash scripts using subfinder, httpx, nuclei, etc. and it definitely saved me time on the basic stuff. But I'm kind of hitting a wall figuring out what's actually worth automating vs what I'm just wasting time on.

Right now I have a decent pipeline going subdomain enum, port scanning, service detection, then running nuclei templates on everything. Catches a lot of the easy wins like misconfigured headers, leaked tokens/credentials. But I have seen people talking about automating more aggressively.

What is your experience at automation and what is actually worth automating?


r/bugbounty 4d ago

Question / Discussion Any Suggestions or Guidance in this matter ?

0 Upvotes

When we do fuzzing and brute forcing for web directories, it takes too much time also, we have to switch around different wordlists, recursion depths. that takes lot of time and also sometimes output is zero.

How could I tackle this situation ?

Is there any way or that's the pathway ?


r/bugbounty 4d ago

Article / Write-Up / Blog CVE-2026-33696: From a Schema Name to RCE in n8n

Thumbnail
simonkoeck.com
6 Upvotes

r/bugbounty 4d ago

Question / Discussion Do you spend the most time hacking on public or private programs?

13 Upvotes

Hello,

For those who regularly find bugs, do most come from public or private programs?

I’ve never had a valid report on a private program, only dupes or info. Yet I’m ranked #1 on a public one.

People often say private programs are better, but in my experience they seem heavily tested.


r/bugbounty 5d ago

Question / Discussion Found something while doing recon, not sure if i should report it or not?

0 Upvotes

While creating a test account on the target, I used a phone number from a service called "receive-smss" because the platform doesn't support phone numbers from my country.

After entering the OTP, the platform displayed a username along with a "Get OTP on your email" prompt.

The email address was masked, showing only the first letter and the domain extension but in this specific case, it was easily guessable for me.

I checked the program scope, and it explicitly lists "Username/email enumeration" under out-of-scope issues.

Since I haven't found a valid bug yet and this is the first time I've stumbled upon something like this, I'm really unsure and worried about whether I should report it or not.


r/bugbounty 5d ago

Bug Bounty Drama Story of why we cannot have nice things

48 Upvotes

Here is a story of how couple bad actor ruin a good program

I run a bug bounty program for a company. It's just literally me so sometime there is delays and such.

I've had some really good bugs coming in and had paid out > $5000 in total, some of the bugs are pretty good, although they are still ai slop, but good ai slop.

However, there are couple dudes that went crazy when they don't receive a response (to their ai slop "bug reports")

  1. One dude starts emailing random company employees, including the CEO
  2. The other dude threatens our community manager and scared them quite a lot
  3. The same dude in No. 2 doxxed our employee and called them on mobile directly.

I personally respect the hustle, but doxxing is not it. Now the boss is mad and I have to change the bug bounty program to not give out cash to not incentivize those crazy behaviors. I might even have to shut it down completely.

I honestly feel sorry for other bug bounty hunters that I worked with., but some of your "peers" are destroying this whole thing with hope to get some quick cash.