Bug hunting, or participating in Vulnerability Disclosure Programs (VDPs) and Bug Bounty Programs, is more than just a job—it’s a dynamic, competitive sport that blends technical skill with deep psychological fortitude. It’s where curiosity meets cash, and persistence often pays off more than raw talent.
If you’ve ever felt discouraged by the steep learning curve or the flood of “duplicate” reports, this post is your guide to reframing failure, honing your strategy, and finding the sustained inspiration that separates the hobbyist from the top-tier hacker.
1. The Truth About the Struggle: The ‘Duplicate’ Wall
When you start bug hunting, the initial feeling of failure can be overwhelming. You might spend days meticulously testing an application, only to have your first valid finding immediately rejected as a Duplicate. This is often the point where many new hunters quit.
The Inspirational Reframing:
Duplication is Validation: A duplicate report means you correctly identified a real vulnerability. This is a massive victory for your methodology! It proves your reconnaissance, analysis, and testing steps were sound. Your issue wasn’t a technical flaw, but a timing issue.
The Race is Motivation: A high competition rate means the company is active, responsive, and (crucially) paying bounties. Instead of seeing the competition as a barrier, see it as a high-stakes race where speed and lateral thinking are rewarded.
Embrace the 90% Failure Rate: The world’s best hunters report that most of their attempts end in failure, or at best, an invalid report. Success is built on a massive pile of discarded theories and failed exploits. Accept that frustration is part of the process, not a sign of your inadequacy.
Hunter’s Mantra: “I don’t look for the bug; I look for the logic flaw that causes the bug. If I found it once, I can find the next one.”
2. Deep Dive: Mastering the Art of Reconnaissance (Recon)
Finding a bug often has less to do with complex hacking skills and more to do with superior intelligence gathering—what hunters call Reconnaissance. The goal is simple: find the neglected corner of the application where nobody else is looking. This is where you find the real inspiration for a bounty.
Core Reconnaissance Strategies and Why They Work:
Go Wide, Not Just Deep:
Strategy: Don’t limit your testing to just the main login page or the public website. Use specialized tools like Subfinder and passive intelligence sources (such as VirusTotal or Censys) to meticulously map all the subdomains associated with the target company.
Inspiration: The biggest bugs rarely hide in the main, highly-tested areas. They are often found in old, forgotten testing environments (e.g., staging.old-app.com) or deprecated services that developers forgot to secure or take offline.
Dig Into Documentation:
Strategy: Security researchers often skip the tedious part: reading the documentation. Look for API documentation, old developer changelogs, forgotten help guides, or even old support portals.
Inspiration: These documents often expose parameters, file paths, or backend endpoints that were never intended for public use but are still live and accessible. Knowing these hidden paths is half the exploit.
Look for Custom Code:
Strategy: Highly-tested, common services (like major identity providers or popular open-source libraries) are tough to break. Instead, focus your energy on custom-built features—a unique file upload handler, a company-specific analytics tracker, or a bespoke integration tool.
Inspiration: Custom code is where developers, under pressure, often make unique and localized mistakes that haven’t been patched by the wider community. Your specific knowledge will shine here.
Version History Attack:
Strategy: Companies sometimes forget to update older versions of their software, libraries, or APIs. Use tools to fingerprint the technology stack.
Inspiration: If you find a component running an older, publicly vulnerable version (e.g., a known flaw in an old version of jQuery or Apache Struts), you have essentially skipped the complex testing and gone straight to a known flaw.
3. The Bug Hunter’s Secret Weapon: The “Chain”
Top-tier bounties rarely come from a single, simple vulnerability. They come from Chaining Vulnerabilities—linking several low-severity flaws together to achieve a high-impact result, often an Account Takeover (ATO) or Remote Code Execution (RCE). The process of chaining is a true test of creativity and deep system understanding.
4. From Hunter to Communicator: Writing the Perfect Report
Finding the bug is only 50% of the battle. The other 50% is writing a clear, professional report that gets quickly validated and paid out. A bad report can turn a Critical bug into a Duplicate or Invalid. The quality of your communication directly affects the size of your reward.
Key Elements for a High-Quality Report:
Clear Title and Impact:
Detail: Always start your title with the most important information: [Severity] Vulnerability Type in [Component] leading to [Impact].
Purpose: This allows the company’s triage team to immediately assess the urgency. (Example: [High] IDOR in API v2 leading to Unauthorized User Data Access.)
Steps to Reproduce (Proof of Concept – PoC):
Detail: This must be a simple, bulleted list, ideally no more than 1 to 5 steps. You must be extremely precise. Include the exact URLs, the critical HTTP requests (often taken from Burp Suite logs), and specify the user roles required (e.g., “As User A,” “As an unauthenticated user”).
Purpose: If the developer cannot follow your steps exactly, your report will fail. Simplicity ensures quick confirmation.
Proof of Concept (PoC) & Evidence:
Detail: Include a short, clear video recording (screen recording) of the exploit in action. Also include sanitized payload text (removing any personal details).
Purpose: Visual proof dramatically speeds up the triage and confirmation process, often by several days, leading to faster payment.
Mitigation Suggestion:
Detail: Show your professionalism by briefly suggesting a fix. For example: “Implement proper authorization checks on the user_id parameter before allowing data retrieval.”
Purpose: This demonstrates you understand the root cause of the flaw, not just the symptom. This makes you a trusted partner, not just a casual hacker.
The Professional Edge: Always maintain courtesy and professionalism. Thank the triage team for their time. Remember, there’s a human on the other side. This courtesy often leads to better communication and faster payouts.
5. Your Inspiration: Consistency Over Intensity
Bug hunting is a marathon, not a sprint. The most successful hunters are those who treat it like a consistent side job: dedicating a few hours every week, rather than pulling an all-nighter once a month.
Set a Schedule: Block out a specific time each week for research and testing.
Focus on Mastery: Instead of learning 10 different vulnerability types poorly, choose one (like XSS or IDOR) and master it across various technologies (Web, Mobile, API).
Learn from Write-ups: Read bug bounty write-ups daily. Platforms like HackerOne and Bugcrowd publish reports from other hackers. This is free education on cutting-edge techniques and the mindset required for discovery.
You are not just hunting bugs; you are sharpening your mind. The skills you develop in vulnerability assessment—system thinking, finding logical gaps, and relentless testing—are invaluable in any field of technology. Keep the curiosity alive, and the bounty will follow.
Relevant Resources and References:
HackerOne & Bugcrowd: Public reports and disclosed vulnerabilities are the best learning tools.
OWASP Top 10: The foundational list of the most critical security risks to web applications (A-series vulnerabilities like Injection, Broken Access Control, etc.).
PortSwigger Web Security Academy: Excellent, structured labs for mastering specific vulnerability types like SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS).
Subfinder, Assetfinder, and other Recon Tools: Open-source tools essential for automating the process of mapping subdomains and finding neglected assets.
