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Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties

digit.fyi

31–40 of 178 posts

Re: Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties

#31
post #2

I like the picture at the beginning of some CLI novice trying to git push his home directory

That reminds me of my idea to create "tech" stock imagery that isn't a joke

If you'd like I can whip up a GUI interface in Visual Basic. You can use that to track an IP address.

Re: Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties

#32
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> understanding data structures and algorithms doesn't necessarily correlate to one's ability to identify security vulnerabilities. No, but it does suggest that you're likely capable of learning security work. Just like your data structure and algorithm knowledge didn't come for free, nobody is born knowing how to find security problems. You need to work for it.

What's a way to learn security work? Genuinely curious.

I'm not a security expert by any means, but based on learning other niche-ish areas of technology, the following probably exist for security:

* Books

* MOOCs

* Lecture notes, slides, and assignments from university courses

* Subreddits, Quora topics, etc

* Prominent community members you can follow on Twitter

Re: Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties

#33
Pro tip if you are a startup and want free security advice. Just sign up for all the bounty sites and for every single bounty just tell the submitter that it is a duplicate bug and pay them nothing, then hot patch it immediately and when they get suspicious tell them that their bug report had absolutely nothing to do with the timing of your patch. I know there are companies that do this because I have had it happen twice. There needs to be a bug bounty site with some sort of bug escrow to prevent this behavior.

Edit: pardon the tone, I understand that these types of problems are very very hard to solve because they aren't purely technical and involve humans.

Re: Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties

#35
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> understanding data structures and algorithms doesn't necessarily correlate to one's ability to identify security vulnerabilities. No, but it does suggest that you're likely capable of learning security work. Just like your data structure and algorithm knowledge didn't come for free, nobody is born knowing how to find security problems. You need to work for it.

What's a way to learn security work? Genuinely curious.

Apart from the standard methods mentioned by other commenters, you can also play CTFs (and read past CTF writeups). The problems in CTFs are not necessarily reflective of the vulnerabilities in modern software, but it's a fun way to learn a lot of the tools and mindset involved in real security research.

Re: Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties

#36
post #33

Pro tip if you are a startup and want free security advice. Just sign up for all the bounty sites and for every single bounty just tell the submitter that it is a duplicate bug and pay them nothing, then hot patch it immediately and when they get suspicious tell them that their bug report had absolutely nothing to do with the timing of your patch. I know there are companies that do this because I have had it happen t…

I don't doubt your lived experience, but for real companies, the economics of ruthlessly withdrawing bounties don't make sense; bounties just don't cost enough money to be worth picking fights over.

There are some patterns where I've seen people not get paid just on general principle; for instance, people find systemic issues and, rather than disclosing the root cause, try to claim bounties for every instance of the flaw (you'll get paid, but not for every instance). It's possible that naive development teams sometimes get this confused, and, for example, consider "all XSS" to be a single systemic bug.

Re: Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties

#37
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> understanding data structures and algorithms doesn't necessarily correlate to one's ability to identify security vulnerabilities. No, but it does suggest that you're likely capable of learning security work. Just like your data structure and algorithm knowledge didn't come for free, nobody is born knowing how to find security problems. You need to work for it.

What's a way to learn security work? Genuinely curious.

In addition to other methods, never underestimate the importance of breaking stuff for yourself. Teenagers are often very good at this (partly because they have the free time and they don't care about the consequences).

Beside that lower level knowledge of how computer systems work is always worth studying up on.

Re: Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties

#39
post #33

Pro tip if you are a startup and want free security advice. Just sign up for all the bounty sites and for every single bounty just tell the submitter that it is a duplicate bug and pay them nothing, then hot patch it immediately and when they get suspicious tell them that their bug report had absolutely nothing to do with the timing of your patch. I know there are companies that do this because I have had it happen t…

I've never had this happen but what I've had in the past is people saying "This isn't a vulnerability", then I told them I would go public with it with an Easy POC that anyone could do.

Example: http://writecodeeveryday.github.io/projects/badqr/

I literally had to twist their arm to get it patched... since was a something to 'reduce friction' which allowed you to steal someone's Bitcoins.

At the time, the POC would have netted me $40 for every person I scammed, today, it's a $400 profit and that tool would generate a QR telling people there's free bitcoin at Coinbase so I bet you someone would have used it.

Edit: I told my boss if they didn't do shit about it, I would put that QR code with 'Social Engineering' into Facebook ads since it had just started and see how much money I made out of it.

Re: Teen Becomes First Hacker to Earn $1M Through Bug Bounties

#40
post #33

Pro tip if you are a startup and want free security advice. Just sign up for all the bounty sites and for every single bounty just tell the submitter that it is a duplicate bug and pay them nothing, then hot patch it immediately and when they get suspicious tell them that their bug report had absolutely nothing to do with the timing of your patch. I know there are companies that do this because I have had it happen t…

It's more likely that low hanging fruit bugs have either been found before or internally by the company, just not yet fixed. Anything that tools like Burp identify is of risk of having been found already by someone else. It's a tough competition where in the grand scheme of things the winner is the company.
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