Practicing and Polishing Your Skills
Practicing helps in developing a framework for approaching a target. The more you practice on diverse targets of different difficulty levels the easier it will be for you to approach a web application in a way that increases your chances of finding a critical vulnerability (or even finding a vulnerability if the application is well-secured and has been already tested by many hunters). Try making great use of these resources:
Vulnerable Web Applications: These are intentionally vulnerable virtual machines or web app packages. Vulnerable web applications are available as general variants that contain many types of vulnerabilities and as dedicated variants that focus on a single vulnerability and its subtleties. Some examples are:
- BWapp
- DVWA
- OWASP Webgoat
- Cyclone Transfers
- Bricks
- Butterfly Security Project
- Hacme
- Juice Shop
- Rails Goat
- SQLol
- BWapp, DVWA(Damn Vulnerable Web Application), and Webgoat are the best for beginners.
How to Get Started With Bug Bounty?
Bug Bounty programs are a great way for companies to add a layer of protection to their online assets. A bug bounty program is a crowdsourced penetration testing program that rewards for finding security bugs and ways to exploit them. For researchers or cybersecurity professionals, it is a great way to test their skills on a variety of targets and get paid well in case they find some security vulnerabilities. The number of companies that have a formal crowdsourced program is increasing and so are the people who want to become freelance penetration testers. The aspiring bug bounty hunters are of much different knowledge, experience, and skill levels.
Some are completely new to the idea of web development with little prior programming experience, some are experienced web developers with no experience in cybersecurity while some are highly skilled cybersecurity professionals. The steps that should be taken are the same for everyone, one can, however, skip one or more steps based on his/her skills and experience.
Let’s get started with these steps: