5 Min Short Interview with Vortex
Tags: Pentesting, Bugcrowd, Hackerone, Hacking, Bug Bounty

Okay its Tuesday Night and I see alot of beginners in bug bounty asking alot of questions like how do i approach a new target, what are the steps involved so well i had a 5min interview engagement with vortex (One Of Bugcrowd p1 warriors)on his methodology during hunting and how he approaches a new target.

Thank you for doing this interview! Can you please introduce yourself?

REDACTED :( But you can find me on twitter https://twitter.com/vortexau

Q: What methodology do you use Like when approaching a new target What’s the first thing you do?

* Learn the application itself, Run it through burp suite, look at the requests and resposes, look for things like file upload etc specifically taking note of places where processing is happening server side etc..

Q: What tools do you use for contents discovery And asset discovery?

Mostly burp tbh.

Q: How do you go through the process using burp?

I tend to keep it pretty slow and methodical — when I have an understanding of the application I go back through the HTTP Proxy history and send anything interesting into repeater, and then fuzz the interesting parameters manually.

Q: What fuzzing tools would you suggest that keeps everything clean and simple?

Given I have a bit of experience here I do it manually. I look at the request itself, and usually have a reasonable idea of what things I can try to trigger a response depending on what the intended outcome is for that bug class. If it’s an XSS, I’ll try a range of quotes, if it’s JSON, nodejs or maybe nosql, I’ll try { and [ etc, SQLi single quotes, pipes etc. In some ways I think that’s the best approach for a new hunter — to do things manually. https://portswigger.net/web-security and https://pentesterlab.com/ are a great practice lab for learning that kind of approach.

Q: Do you always look for all vulnerabilities types when you approach a website?

I keep an open mind on what I will find, but based on the above it depends on what I see in the application itself.

Q: Do you use any tools?

Mostly just burp suite on webapps, but I have also done a bit with jsparser to find interesting things in scripts

Time To Wrap It Up

Q: How Did You Begin Your bug bounty career?

I got into it primarily as a way to learn more about the vulns I hadn’t seen in pen-tests, so learning was the primary goal especially in the early days. Earning a few $$ on the side came along later as my skills improved.

Q: If someone with basic technical background asked you, “where should I start?”, what are 3 things you would recommend they do before diving into bug bounties?

Develop a good working understanding of what kinds of vulnerabilities will lead to impactful discoveries, and then understand how to communicate that in terms of risk to the program (business)

Q: What’s your worst bug bounty story/experience? (Please do not mention a customer name or platform in your answer)

Not understanding why a self XSS wasn’t a risk for the program (was my first submission to a platform in 2016)

Q: If you had to pick one hacker to collaborate with, who would it be?

I can’t pick just one. There are so many amazing folks I’ve worked with! And would Love to work with :)

Q: Any Advice you would like to share for beginners in Bug Bounty?

Keep Reading and Practicing and never Give up, You'll reach there one day with hard-work and persistence

Find Vortex On twitter