Being a Bug Bounty Hunter

Bug Bounty Hunt is the process of searching for bugs, finding vulnerabilities, and reporting the reward to the security team of the site.

4 min readMay 23, 2020

Bug bounty hunting pays you to find vulnerabilities in software, websites, and web applications. Basically, you use these tools to break things up, put a bounty on the company, and then get paid. Security teams in large companies do not have enough resources to eradicate all the bugs they have, so they turn to private contractors for help.

Hackers earn tens of thousands of dollars a year just to hunt down bugs, so the profession of bug bounty hunter has taken hold. Linked to this is the ability for hackers to make money to make the Internet safer, and many other benefits.

As with code writing, remember that it takes consistency, determination, and a lot of feedback to call yourself a successful and competent bug bounty hunter. Whoever thinks outside the box and can best implement his ideas needs a bounty.

The whole idea of the program is to prevent vulnerabilities from destroying your business by compensating hackers for finding and reporting back doors to corporate assets. If you have a large number of hunters and your bug bounty program only covers one security area, you can secure the entire operation, but you still can’t find anything. Successful bug bounties hunting requires an enormous amount of motivation and patience.

Bug bounty hunters are also humans, and they come in all shapes and sizes, but full-time bug bounty hunters are rare, but their numbers are growing steadily.

Talented hackers have learned to make a lot of money by essentially destroying web services, as large companies have found that it is easier to pay bounty hunters to find their mistakes than to spend hours searching for them. For most, it is a hobby, but some hackers do it full-time, and some do it just when they need some cash. As long as the money flows, hackers will find legitimate ways to make a living while making a difference — even if they are unwilling to take matters into their own hands.

This allows them to retain their skills and learn more while earning a nice supplement to their regular salary and many are able to go part-time or even full-time for a small business to troubleshoot. Some 15-year-olds have given up their day jobs, such as studying computer science, to devote themselves full-time to troubleshooting.

One of the things that make hackers hungry for bug bounties is when they spend just a few minutes searching for a bug, finding it, reporting it, and seemingly getting money for nothing.

Many ethical hacking courses provide training and resources to help you develop the skills you need to perform bug bounty hunting for web applications.

There are certain procedures that bug bounty hunters must follow to successfully obtain a bounty in exchange for finding bugs in the system. Enough is going on to be a bug bounty hunter to be something of an emerging profession.

At first, your friends and family may not understand your work as a bug bounty hunter, but when you explain your work and put the bounties on, they will realize that this is a real professional option. You can begin to earn a small amount of money. For instance, my first bounty was a $100 bug bounty for a vulnerability in the Linux kernel.

Bug bounty hunters are often developers or penetration testers, and they attend invited events to collaborate with other hackers and find bugs. Invited — only events with certain companies require additional preparation time but are not as expensive as an invitation with a particular company.

The average reported by Bugcrowd is $505.79, and bounties paid by companies can average between $200 and $200,000. Just because you earn an average of about $1,000 per mistake does not mean you get thousands of dollars every time.

Being a Bug Bounty Hunter

Bug Bounty Hunt is the process of searching for bugs, finding vulnerabilities, and reporting the reward to the security team of the site.

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Written by Ensar Seker

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