Different companies such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo started rewarding people, who successfully uncover the vulnerabilities of their websites. Cyber security experts or bug bounty hunters dig loopholes in the websites of various companies with prerequisite skills, training and practical knowledge.

What is a Bug Bounty Program?

A bug bounty program is a contract agreed by many websites, organizations and software developers, through which people can get recognition and reward for reporting loopholes, those relating to security exploits and vulnerabilities.

 Such programs allow the bug bounty hunters to find bugs in their digital assets so that companies can correct them before it comes to the knowledge of the public, to prevent widespread abuse.

Why do Companies Launch Bug Bounty Programs?

An initiative by companies to improve and upgrade the security measures of their digital platform is the core reason behind bug bounty programs. The cost of hiring security professionals can be huge enough than rewarding the bug bounty hunters. Though most companies own security teams, still big corporations like Facebook, Google, and others launch and develop a lot of software, domains and products in a continuous manner.

Thus, it becomes tough for the security teams to test all the targets, as they are very large in number. In line with such difficulties, bug bounty became an efficient way for the companies to test all their digital assets in a continuous manner.

Big corporations can rely on the acknowledgement of the ethical hackers, which makes more sense for the companies to use bug bounty programs. But for small corporations with limited resources, hesitate  to initiate bug bounty programs as they might receive a lot of vulnerabilities.

Who are Bug Bounty Hunters?

These individuals have in-depth knowledge in cyber security and are well versed in finding flaws and vulnerabilities. Various platforms reward them in case they have found vulnerabilities in applications and software.

Bug bounty hunters have a strong understanding of network fundamentals, SQL database and web components like HTML, CSS, PHP and Javascript. This increases the opportunity of analyzing the vulnerabilities. These individuals must be comfortable with at least one of the scripting languages: python, bash. This will add great value to create their own tools that would specifically help them to achieve goals.

How Does a Bug Bounty Program Work?

Before launching a bounty, companies set the scope and budget of the program. It defines which systems, tools or software a hacker may test. If any vulnerabilities are found within the scope, bug bounty hunters make a disclosure report, containing a breakdown of the risk using Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), a description of the vulnerability, and its impact. It also includes security advice and fixes for the flaw.

There shall be no violation of the set rules in discovering the vulnerability. Bug bounty can be private or public. Generally, companies choose to host a private bug bounty, since it is open to a selected group of ethical hackers.

Bug Bounty Training

When you acquire any skill, you put efforts to enhance your knowledge through practice. Similarly, bug bounty hunting requires immense practice in cracking vulnerabilities of various websites and applications. The following resources can be helpful:

• DROP Organization is providing a practical training course on the Bug Bounty program for beginners through interactive sessions and text boxes. It facilitates live classes and offers tools and software to enhance your practice.
• Next up, you can try BugBountyHunter, for a more realistic bug-hunting experience. This platform provides free challenges in accordance with real-world bug bounty findings.
• To craft the vulnerability reports becomes a tough task, but Google has resources to ease the process. Bug Hunter University, headed by Google Security Team, explains eligible and ineligible report types and how to write them.

Some Renowned Bug Bounty Programs

Payouts or rewards depend on the nature and severity of the security bug. It may range from a few thousand dollars to several million dollars. Below given are some examples:

1. Apple Security Bounty 

Apple launched a private program and made it public in late 2019. The tech giant has paid the researchers nearly $20 million in total since 2020, with an average compensation of $40,000 in the “Product” category.

    2. Microsoft Bug Bounty

Microsoft Bug Bounty extends to the firm’s cloud, platform and defense and grant programs. In 2022, the firm shelled out $13.7 million in rewards for over 330 security researchers across 46 countries.

    3. Google and Alphabet Vulnerability Rewards Program

Any Google-owned or Alphabet subsidiary web service that manages “reasonably sensitive user data” falls within the scope of the firm’s Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP). For example, all content in the “.google.com, .youtube.com, .blogger.com and .verily.com” domains, among others, qualify.

    4. Intel Bug Bounty

The Intel Bug Bounty program primarily targets vulnerabilities in the company’s hardware, firmware and software. It is notable that the residents of US government- embargoed countries are not eligible to participate in the bug bounty program.

Bug Hunter Toolkit

Web Browser

The preferred version of a web browser “Google Chrome/ Firefox” can be used to weaponize and you can make some addons as well to make your testing journey easy.

You can use the developer tools in the browser, which may save much of your time to analyze requests and how the application interacts with the user.

Proxy

Proxy acts as a gateway between you and the internet. You can trap all the traffic between your browser and the target website using proxy. This may help you to manipulate the request before being sent and watch all the requests made to the target website when you initiate any action.

The most famous proxy tools are BurpSuite and ZAP Proxy.

DROP provides a wider understanding on how to use these tools in an efficient way and how it behaves. These automated tools help you save a lot of time and effort in the enumeration phase.

Automated Tools

Tools like Sublist3r, Subfinder, and others, helps to perform subdomain enumeration. While using these tools, you can take screenshots of the subdomains found by you to check if they are up and what is running on the admin panel or unintended information is publicly available.

After knowing the scope, you are approaching, you can start testing the web/mobile application functions and identify if there are valid vulnerabilities for reporting purposes.

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