By Bear in bug bounty — Apr 11, 2023

Bug Bounty Phase 1 - Platforms

You may wonder where to begin when searching for bug bounty programs. This short blog aims to help you narrow down your search for the best platforms and programs to get you finding those elusive bugs.

Photo by Devon Rogers / Unsplash

What is a bug bounty platform?

To begin your bug bounty journey, you firstly need to choose a platform.

There are many platforms out there and are the main source to find programs from which allow you to legally hunt for bugs.

A bug bounty program is a offer from the environment owner to permit bug hunters to test their environment and receive kudos and compensation for reporting any issues.

Environments may consist of web applications, mobile applications, infrastructure, cloud and more.

What is the best bug bounty program?

This question depends on you. Firstly, you can view each platform for its program list and you can choose whether you are happy to test for kudos and swag, or if you want to test only for monetary compensation.

With that decided, you have narrowed down your program options vastly. Next, you can think about the following to further narrow down a program:

Vulnerable Assets

You may see that a program is active and bug hunters are consistently findings issues. This is a good indicator that you are also likely to find issues. Whereas, if you see a program that hasn't had an issue found in a long time, it is likely that the scope is too restrictive or the entity is hardened.

New or Private

New or private programs have the benefit of not having had many hunters look at the scope. This is great for finding issues, especially easily found low hanging fruit issues. If you get invited to a private bug bounty program or see a new program, happy hunting.

Open scope

Other than the above considerations, look for programs with the most open scopes. These are usually presented with wildcard domain names, such as *.example.com or you may be provided with IP Addresses and ASN numbers. Essentially, the more targets the better, because you have so much more to potentially find when it comes to target discovery.