How to Learn Bug Bounty

Bug bounty is not a salary. It is piecework on hard mode, where you compete against thousands of hunters for the same assets. People who treat it as a get rich quick scheme quit in month two. People who treat it as paid practice that occasionally pays well tend to stay and eventually succeed.

• What it is good for sharpening real skills on real targets, building a public reputation, and earning on the side while you learn
• What it is bad for a predictable first income. Treat early bounties as a bonus, not rent
• What it needs patience and consistency. The hunters who win are the ones still testing after the first fifty duplicates

Bug bounty is around ninety percent web. You cannot find a vulnerability in something you do not understand, so this is the non negotiable base.

• HTTP in detail, methods, status codes, request and response headers
• How a request actually travels, client, server, application, database
• REST and JSON APIs, since most modern bugs live in API calls, not page loads

• Cookies, sessions and tokens, and how a site decides who you are
• The same origin policy and CORS, because a lot of bugs are boundary failures
• How forms, redirects and JavaScript driven requests send data

• Read JavaScript well enough to follow what a front end is doing
• Write simple Python to automate repetitive requests

Learn the bug class first and the payload second. A payload you copied stops working the moment the target is slightly different. Understanding the class means you can adapt.

• Injection SQL injection, command injection, server side template injection
• Cross site scripting reflected, stored and DOM based, and why context decides the payload
• Access control IDOR, privilege escalation, authentication and authorisation bypass. This class is the beginner's best friend because scanners miss it
• SSRF server side request forgery, especially against cloud metadata
• Business logic the bugs no scanner finds, because they require understanding intent
• File handling unrestricted upload, path traversal

Recon is how you find the assets nobody else is looking at. A forgotten subdomain running old software is where a beginner's first bug usually hides, because the obvious targets are already picked clean.

• Subdomains subfinder, amass, and certificate transparency logs
• Content discovery ffuf and dirsearch for hidden paths, plus parsing JavaScript files for endpoints
• Live hosts httpx to probe, screenshot and fingerprint technology
• Parameters find hidden parameters that the normal UI never exposes

Burp Suite is where you will spend most of your hunting hours. The free Community edition is enough to start. Learn it deeply, not just the intercept tab everyone stops at.

• Proxy intercept and read every request your browser sends
• Repeater your main manual testing bench, modify and resend endlessly
• Intruder fuzzing, brute forcing and enumeration at scale
• Decoder and Comparer for encoding work and spotting subtle response differences

• Autorize for access control testing, one of the fastest paths to IDOR findings
• Param Miner for hidden parameters and headers
• Logger plus plus for a full searchable history of everything

Now you point everything at real targets, legally. This is where most beginners quit, because the first months are mostly duplicates and informatives. That is not failure, that is the entry fee.

• Pick one platform HackerOne, Bugcrowd or Intigriti, and start with programs that welcome new hunters
• Read the scope every single time out of scope testing gets you banned, not paid
• Go narrow and deep one program, one bug class, for weeks. Depth finds what breadth misses
• Target logic and access control the areas where automated scanners are weakest and humans win

The report is the product you are actually selling. A strong bug with a weak report gets closed or underpaid. A clear report gets triaged fast and rewarded fairly.

• Title one line that states the bug and its impact, no mystery
• Steps to reproduce precise enough that a tired triager can follow them first try
• Impact explained in business terms, what an attacker actually gains
• Proof a clean screenshot or short video, and the exact request
• Suggested fix turns your report from a complaint into something actionable

You need safe targets to practise on before and alongside real programs.

• PortSwigger Web Security Academy the structured labs for every bug class, free
• OWASP Juice Shop and DVWA vulnerable apps you can run locally and break freely
• Hacklido Labs browser based web and API security labs at learn.hacklido.com, no setup needed
• Public disclosed reports read accepted HackerOne reports to learn how good hunters think and write

Based on six to ten focused hours a week.