📄️ Intro to Recon
Reconnaissance, or "recon," is the crucial initial phase of bug bounty hunting. It involves gathering as much information as possible about your target before actively looking for vulnerabilities. The goal is to understand the target's entire digital footprint, identify potential entry points, and expand the attack surface.
📄️ Fingerprinting Web Applications
Fingerprinting a web application is the process of identifying the specific technologies, versions, and configurations it uses. This includes web servers, programming languages, frameworks, content management systems (CMS), JavaScript libraries, and other components. This information is invaluable for a bug bounty hunter, as it allows for targeted vulnerability research.
📄️ OSINT for Bug Hunting
OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) is the practice of collecting and analyzing information from publicly available sources. In bug bounty hunting, OSINT is a critical reconnaissance phase, helping you map a target's entire digital footprint and uncover hidden assets, forgotten code, or misconfigurations that often lead to vulnerabilities.
📄️ Subdomain Enumeration
Subdomain enumeration is a critical reconnaissance technique in bug bounty hunting. It involves discovering all possible subdomains associated with a target domain. This process significantly expands your attack surface, revealing potentially forgotten, misconfigured, or less-monitored assets that might host vulnerabilities. A thorough subdomain list is often the key to finding high-impact bugs.
📄️ Directory Enumeration
Directory enumeration (also known as content discovery or brute-forcing directories and files) is a fundamental reconnaissance technique. It involves systematically searching for hidden or unlinked files and directories on a web server. This process often uncovers sensitive information, forgotten functionalities, administrative interfaces, and misconfigurations that can lead to critical vulnerabilities.
📄️ Port Scanning
Port scanning involves sending requests to a target host to identify which ports are open, what services are running on them, and often, the version of that software and the underlying operating system. This process provides a low-level view of a target's network attack surface.
📄️ Google Dorking
Google Dorking, also known as Google Hacking, leverages advanced search operators in Google (and other search engines) to find specific, often sensitive, information about a target. This powerful reconnaissance technique uncovers misconfigurations, leaked data, hidden files, or vulnerable endpoints that regular browsing might miss. As a bug bounty hunter, mastering Google Dorking provides a low-interaction, highly effective way to expand your attack surface.