Top 10 Bug Bounty Tips for Beginners

Essential lessons I learned the hard way when starting out in ethical hacking. From avoiding duplicate burnout to finding high-signal targets.

# Top 10 Bug Bounty Tips for Beginners

Entering the world of bug bounty hunting is thrilling, but it can also be overwhelming. When I first started out as a student in cybersecurity, I spent dozens of hours running automated scanners on high-profile targets with zero findings and endless duplicate reports.

Over the last few years—reporting vulnerabilities to NASA, WHO, and Fortune 500 companies—I developed a systematic playbook that changed everything. Here are my top 10 practical tips for every beginner:

1. Specialize Before You Generalize Don't try to master SSRF, Race Conditions, IDOR, GraphQL vulnerabilities, and Binary Exploitation all on day one. Pick **one vulnerability class** (such as Insecure Direct Object References or IDOR) and study everything about it. Read 30 HackerOne writeups specifically on IDOR until you can spot the pattern with your eyes closed.

2. Manual Testing Always Beats Automated Scanners Every beginner runs the exact same automated scanners (Nikto, default Nuclei, OWASP ZAP) against broad scopes. If a scanner can find it, 500 other hunters found it within 10 minutes of the program launching. Use automation for **reconnaissance**, but perform **manual application exploration** for business logic flaws.

3. Read the Javascript Source Code Modern web applications pack an incredible amount of logic into client-side JavaScript bundles. Use tools like `js-beautify` or Burp's built-in parser to read through `main.bundle.js`. You will frequently discover: - Hidden admin API routes - Forgotten debug feature flags - Client-side validation checks that can be bypassed in transit - Hardcoded staging endpoints

// Example of a hidden endpoint found inside a webpack chunk
const ADMIN_CONFIG = {
  endpoint: "/api/v2/internal/user-lookup",
  debug: false
};

4. Understand the Business Flow Put away your payload lists for the first 30 minutes on a target. Create two user accounts: 1. User A (Victim) 2. User B (Attacker) Go through the complete flow: onboarding, inviting team members, changing passwords, modifying invoice details, updating phone numbers. When you understand what the application is *supposed* to do, finding what it *fails* to restrict becomes natural.

5. Always Check Mobile and Staging Endpoints Companies frequently harden their main web landing page (`target.com`), but forget about: - `api-stage.target.com` - `mobile-gateway.target.com` - Endpoints intended exclusively for their Android or iOS apps that omit rate limiting or strict CORS.

6. Write Stellar Vulnerability Reports Triage teams read hundreds of low-quality submissions every day. If your report contains: - A concise summary - Severity score (CVSS) - Clean, numbered reproduction steps - A short Proof of Concept video or clear screenshot - Remediation guidance

Your report will be triaged 3x faster and you will earn respect from the program's security engineers.

7. Embrace Rejection and Duplicates Every great hunter has hundreds of "Informative" or "Duplicate" marks. View every duplicate as proof that your recon and exploitation intuition was correct—you were just slightly behind on time. Keep pushing forward!