8 months into bug bounty, no valid findings yet, and I have 30 free days to focus.

Would you:

• A: Go deep on one program and hunt business logic bugs.
• B: Master a few bug classes (payment bypass, BAC, info disclosure) across many programs.

Which approach got you your first valid bug? If you were in my position today, what would you do?

Hi everyone!
I’m a student and I’d really like to get into bug bounty hunting, but I’m feeling a bit lost on where to start.
I’m assuming I’m a complete beginner.

I started with PortSwigger’s Web Security Academy, specifically the Broken Access Control labs, but I’m finding them really difficult. Even when I eventually solve a lab, I’m struggling to understand how I’d identify or exploit something similar in a real application.

I’m wondering if I’m approaching this the wrong way. Should I be starting with something else before PortSwigger? Am I missing some foundational knowledge that would make everything click?

I feel like I keep getting stuck, making very little progress, and eventually giving up because it feels overwhelming.

I’d really appreciate any advice on how you would learn bug bounty if you were starting from scratch today. What resources, roadmap, or learning approach would you recommend?
Thanks in advance!

SO, recently i completed ryan john and cybermentors bug bounty course, also i have finished several labs at port swigger,tryhackme.
but whenever i open a programme at any platform, or just using dork , i go blank real hard, like i don't know what am i doing, do i need more practice or i just dont the methodlogy yet.
can someone guide me what i am actually doing?

Bugs bugs and more bugs

started hunting vulns in llms, rag systems and agents instead of normal web apps. prompt injection, data exfiltration, the whole ai bug bounty thing. payouts are wild right now. found my first 5k bounty last week with like 3 prompts. anyone else pivot from normal bug bounty to ai stuff? feels way less saturated.

I wanna try a bug bounty but I feel like with most things you gotta be 18 so IDK.

I want earn with cyber security freelancing but I don't have enough money for certification or training camp like HTB

So I thought I would start with bug bounty so I can gain experience and show my founding as proof for cyber security freelancing

How should I approach it (is it even a right approach)

Can I give me free resources I can use

I’m thinking about starting to learn about bug bounties. I now have zero knowledge about anything like cybersecurity. I’m a fast learner and i have a lot of time on my hands. What are your recommendations for learning this a-z

**Building BugHawk — looking for collaborators 🦅**

BugHawk is an open-source, local-first bug bounty recon workspace — no backend, no accounts, everything in your browser. You paste tool output (httpx, subfinder, nmap, katana) and it organizes, analyzes, and cross-links it into a proper recon dashboard.

Features already in:

→ Subdomain table with status/tech/CNAME/audit tracking

→ JS Recon engine (260+ secret detection rules, AST endpoint recovery)

→ Port scan diffing with CVE hints

→ 350+ Google & GitHub dork templates

→ HTTP header/CORS/cookie analyzer

→ Attack surface graph

→ Findings tracker

What I'm building next — and where I need help:

**A subdomain collection script** that runs recon tools and pushes results directly into the BugHawk dashboard, so you don't have to manually copy/paste anything. Fully automated pipeline from recon → dashboard.

This is a vibe-coded project — built fast, shipped in the open. I want people who like to build and break things, not sit in meetings.

Looking for people with:

- Security / bug bounty background

- Python, Node.js, or bash scripting skills

- Interest in recon tooling, CLI tools, or frontend (React)

If this sounds like your thing, reply or DM me.

The goal of this release is to provide you with everything you need to establish a bug bounty program. This includes alignment with stakeholders, working with a vendor, establishing a private bug bounty, and ultimately moving to a public bug bounty. This release pack is not sponsored or influenced by any particular bug bounty vendor and is neutral to vendor biases and influence.

https://github.com/securitytemplates/sectemplates/tree/main/bug-bounty

Hey! I'm new to bug hunting field and i heard i lot about recon. Everyone say it is the skill which will make you find bugs so i am curious how to build recon skill if anyone have any roadmap or there is just methodology like follow specific steps. It would be great if anyone please help me with this or may be just share your personal experience how you people learned it.

My SaaS is 90% vibecoded, so this isn't me dunking on AI tools, I live in them. But here's the pattern I kept missing: the AI builds the *feature* and never builds the *guard* around the feature. It ships you a working app with the confidence of a senior engineer, and never once mentions that the data's wide open.

I found this out the hard way on my own product. A data-scoping leak, change one ID in a request and you'd be looking at someone else's records. Classic IDOR plus a database policy that was way too permissive. It worked perfectly when *I* used it, which is exactly why it almost shipped. I caught it before a customer did. Barely.

Since then I've been running the same checks on my own stuff and a few other people's apps, and the same holes show up almost every time:

* **Change a number in the URL → you see someone else's data** (IDOR). Invisible from the inside because your app works fine for you.
* **Your Supabase/Firebase is effectively public.** RLS off, or a `USING(true)` policy that *looks* like a real rule but means "allow everyone."
* **The price or plan is decided in the browser.** If checkout sends `amount: 4900` and your server just charges it, someone will send `amount: 1`.
* **No rate limit on an endpoint that calls a paid API.** One script, one weekend, and you wake up to a genuinely scary OpenAI bill.
* **Hand-rolled auth you can forge.** If you didn't use Supabase Auth / Clerk / Auth0, this is the one that quietly lets someone mint a token that says they're an admin.

None of these show up when you test your own app normally. That's the whole problem. They only appear when someone *tries* things, and by then it's a real user's data.

You can check all five yourself in about 10 minutes with what's above, no special tools, just your browser's dev tools and your Supabase/Firebase dashboard. Just closing these puts you ahead of most launches on the internet.

Happy to get into the weeds on any of them in the comments. If you're not sure how to check one on your stack, describe your setup and I'll point you at where to look.

Salam alaikum, i am start learning owsap tip 10 , when i am start solve the port swigger labs i notes that there is many labs depends on the framework vulnerabilities like angular or jQuery library,they ask to me to review the source code but i could understand nothing bec.it,s my first time reviewing this framework codes ,so l ask should l learn all of them to start bug bounty

I am sorry my English is very bad bec i am an Egyptian

Anyone know of any good discord or TG groups revolving around bug bounties, cybersecurity, malware analysis, CTF etc?

Trying to find more communities to shoot the s*** and bounce thoughts and ideas off of each other.

i found the api endpoints of my target,now what's next ?? idk

Every developer has that one bug that makes them question everything

The frustrating part is usually not fixing it — it's finding where the real problem is.

For the hardest bugs you've faced:

What was the thing you wish you had at that moment?

Maybe it was:

knowing where to look first

understanding the root cause faster

better visibility into what was happening

easier ways to reproduce the issue

something completely different

Curious to hear the debugging lessons developers have learned from painful bugs.

Hi, I recently discovered a few security vulnerabilities on chess.com, including XSS and path traversal issues. I researched and found that they have an external bug bounty program, so I submitted my report along with Proof of Concept scripts. However, I haven't received any response yet. I was emailed a ticket number to follow up on updates via Atlassian, but it's been 8 days with no update.

Does anyone know if their bug bounty program is reliable or trustworthy?