Book Image

Bug Bounty Hunting Essentials

By : Carlos A. Lozano, Shahmeer Amir
Book Image

Bug Bounty Hunting Essentials

By: Carlos A. Lozano, Shahmeer Amir

Overview of this book

Bug bounty programs are the deals offered by prominent companies where-in any white-hat hacker can find bugs in the applications and they will have a recognition for the same. The number of prominent organizations having this program has increased gradually leading to a lot of opportunity for Ethical Hackers. This book will initially start with introducing you to the concept of Bug Bounty hunting. Then we will dig deeper into concepts of vulnerabilities and analysis such as HTML injection, CRLF injection and so on. Towards the end of the book, we will get hands-on experience working with different tools used for bug hunting and various blogs and communities to be followed. This book will get you started with bug bounty hunting and its fundamentals.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Bug bounty hunting platforms


A few years ago, if someone found a vulnerability in a website, it was not easy to find the right method to contact the web application owners and then too after contacting them it was not guaranteed that they would respond in time or even at all. Then there was also the factor of the web application owners threatening to sue the reporter. All of these problems were solved by vulnerability co-ordination platforms or bug bounty platforms. A bug bounty platform is a platform that manages programs for different companies. The management includes:

  • Reports
  • Communication
  • Reward payments

There are a number of different bug bounty platforms being used by companies nowadays. The top six platforms are explained in the following sections.

HackerOne

HackerOne is a vulnerability collaboration and bug bounty hunting platform that connects companies with hackers. It was one of the first start-ups to commercialize and utilize crowd-sourced security and hackers as a part of its business model, and is the biggest cybersecurity firm of its kind.

Bugcrowd

Bugcrowd Inc. is a company that develops a coordination platform that connects businesses with researchers so as to test their applications. It offers testing solutions for web, mobile, source code, and client-side applications.

Cobalt

Cobalt's Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) platform converts broken pentest models into a data-driven vulnerability co-ordination engine. Cobalt's crowdsourced SaaS platform delivers results that help agile teams to pinpoint, track, and remediate vulnerabilities.

Synack

Synack is an American technology company based in Redwood City, California. Synack's business includes a vulnerability intelligence platform that automates the discovery of exploitable vulnerabilities for reconnaissance and turns them over to the company's freelance hackers to create vulnerability reports for clients.