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The Ultimate List of Bug Hunting Resources for Beginners
TL;DR- If you’re new to cybersecurity, you’ll absolutely want to take a look at one of the highest earning activities for white-hat hackers — Bug Bounties.
Introduction
In this post, I’ll be reviewing the absolute basics of bug hunting, and a ton of great tools and resources. We’ll take a look at what bug bounties are, basic tech skills, and how to become a skilled pen-tester.
If you’re into programming, you can even develop your own bug hunting toolkit! Stick around and I’ll showcase my personal scripts that I’ve used for numerous bounties.
Note: This post does contain affiliate links for some of the resources, which don’t add any extra cost to your purchase, but helps me out through a small portion of the proceeds.
What is bug hunting?
More and more organizations and companies are starting to create programs that allow vulnerabilities to be reported legally, and with monetary rewards. While you could utilize vulnerabilities you’ve found to expose user data on the dark web (like a black-hat hacker), there’s also a great legal option.
These programs enable developers to identify and fix bugs before the general public is aware of them, preventing widespread abuse. A large number of organizations, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Uber, Github, and many others have implemented these sorts of programs.
Companies like Yahoo and Uber frequently pay out $50K+ bounties, with some of the highest payouts coming from Google and Apple at $170K and over $2m respectively.
Even companies outside of the technology industry, including government branches such as the US Department of Defense, have started to use bug bounty programs hosted on HackerOne.
Remember…
1- You’ll have plenty of help from others, but you’ll need to put in a lot of work to see significant results.
2- You will not become a world famous bug hunter overnight.
