How to Get Started in Bug Bounty Hunting

Bug bounty hunting is one of the most sought career trends of these days. The scope of jobs in the field of Cyber Security has not only been restricted to operations like penetration testing or vulnerability assessment. Independent professionals like bug bounty hunters are leveraging the high amount of bounties and satisfying career with ceaseless growth.

Many platforms provide bug bounty hunters the facility of choosing web applications to hunt for bugs and earn good bounties in return for the bugs they report as per the severity and type of vulnerability. You don’t need to confuse bug bounty with penetration testing as both are not the same but very different. To become a successful bug bounty, you are required to be patient and persistent while finding some significant bugs.

Here we will discuss the basics to get started in bug bounty hunting for websites and applications.

Before you get started in bug bounty, let us discuss some key points to remember in this field of Cyber Security.

• You do not only earn bounties but also serve people who are using that particular platform by protecting their personal data and other important information which could be breached because of a vulnerability.
• Hacking sounds and is considered illegal by many organizations whereas one can use their skills to help organizations to sustain their information systems.
• You can get recognized by the world-leading organizations by participating in their bug bounty program. Organizations like Microsoft, Google, Intel, IBM, and many others reward bug bounty hunters with worldwide recognition and a good amount of money.

Bug Bounty in Websites

Different websites have different scopes of the targets in their application test environments. Before going deep into the websites, you should perform a quick run through the webservers to find common platforms those websites might have been developed on.

This leads to some fast searching in the case of custom plugins used in the process. Such open-source plugins are generally made poorly and some source reviews also lead to crucial searchings. After gathering information and gaining access to the different fields, you would need to maintain the access there.

Bug Bounty in Applications

To detect bugs in the applications, you will first need to deeply comprehend the complete applications or modules. By preparing good test cases before starting the test process, you can give stress on functional test cases which would also comprise the risk of the applications. Then you can prepare adequate test data before performing tests, and this database would typically feature the test case conditions along with the database records that can be used to test database-related applications.

Afterward, tests are repeated with different test environments. Resulting patterns can be extracted and compared with the results of recent patterns. The set of previous test data can be used to analyze the presented set of tests.

Subsequently, standard test cases are utilized to detect the bugs in different applications like trying to test the input text box with the insertion of a few HTML tags in form of inputs and get the output presented on the display page. There you can break the application to report bugs.

How Bug Bounty Programs are organized

A bug bounty program is an arrangement made by an organization allowing individuals to exploit potential vulnerabilities in their systems. This approach of detecting bugs is practiced to escape the general public recognizing the bugs which may lead to a large-scale misuse of the vulnerabilities in their systems.

The concept of such programs may seem to be similar to that of conventional penetration, although, the approach is directly opposite. The bug bounty hunters with the best bugs found win such competitions. You would need to prepare yourself hard for such programs to earn a significant amount of money, thus it would be better to pursue a Bug Bounty Course.

Not all the organizations open such programs, because they can also face some issues related to their security systems and credibility. So Bug Bounty programs are also the security assessment programs of organizations and are needed to be accomplished successfully.