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 hunter statistics


A bug bounty hunter's profile contains substantial information about the track record that helps organizations identify the skill level and skill set of the user. The bug bounty hunter stats include a number of pointers in the profile that indicate the level of the researcher. Different pointers indicate different levels on different platforms. But generally you will see the following pointers and indicators based on which you can judge a researcher's potential.

Number of vulnerabilities

The first thing you can observe in a researcher's profile is how many vulnerabilities the researcher has reported in his bug bounty hunting career. This indicated how much the researcher is active on the platform and how many vulnerabilities he has reported to date. A high number of reported vulnerabilities does not usually mean that the researcher has a positive track record and is relative to different factors. That is, if the researcher has 1,000 vulnerabilities submitted over a period of 1 year, the researcher is quite active.

Number of halls of fame

This is the number of programs to which the researcher has reported positive vulnerabilities to. The number of halls of fame is the number of programs the researcher participated in and had valid reports in those programs. A high number of programs means the level of participation of the researcher is active. That is, if the researcher has 150 halls of fame out of a total of 170 programs, the researcher is successful.

Reputation points

This is a relatively new indicator and it differs from platform to platform. Reputation points are points awarded for valid reports. It is a combination of the severity of the report, the bounty awarded to the report, and the bonus bounty of the report. That is, if the researcher has 8,000 reputation points over time, then he is above average.

 

Signal

A signal is an aggregate representation of report validity. It is basically a point-based system that represents how many invalid reports the researcher has submitted. A signal is calculated out of 10.

Impact

Impact is a representation of the average bounty awarded per report. It is an aggregate of the total bounty that was awarded for every report that was filed.

Accuracy

This is a percent-based system that indicates the number of accepted reports divided by the number of total reports. This tells the program owners how much success rate the researcher has in reporting vulnerabilities. If researcher A has 91% accuracy rate, he submits reports that are mostly valid.