In today’s world, cybersecurity holds top priority for most organizations and governments. Large companies are investing millions of dollars in various technologies to strengthen their security infrastructure. However, no matter how robust the system is, there will always be loopholes that remain undetected. This is where ethical hackers step in to help companies detect these loopholes. Moreover, there has been a tremendous increase of 143% in the number of bug bounty hunters.
They can automate some of the testing processes by using bug bounty automation tools. These tools are designed to provide continuous analysis of your web application’s risks so that you can focus on other security activities.
What Is a Bug Bounty?
Bug bounty programs are a deal offered by many websites and software developers by which individuals can receive recognition and compensation for reporting bugs, especially exploits and vulnerabilities. These programs allow the developers to discover and resolve bugs before the general public is aware of them, preventing incidents of widespread abuse.
Bug bounty programs are primarily used in web security; many companies, including Mozilla, Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, GitHub, Nintendo, and Square, offer bug bounties after their bug bounty program is launched. However, the concept of bug bounties is not new — some notable models include the 1996 “Find a Bug” contest by Netscape Communications Corporation.
This article will discuss top bug bounty tools list you should consider adding to your arsenal.
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Burp Suite is a collection of tools written in Java by PortSwigger which can be used to test the security of web applications. The devices can be used by manual testers or integrated into an automated vulnerability discovery suite.
The suite consists of several tools, as described below:
Burp Proxy: Burp Proxy is an intercepting HTTP proxy server. The Burp Proxy tool is one of the tools included in the Burp Suite and allows you to intercept HTTP traffic that passes between your browser and the target application. You can intercept and modify this traffic by configuring your browser’s proxy settings to point at Burp Proxy.
Burp Spider: The Burp spider is a tool for automatically crawling web applications. It is designed to facilitate testing by automatically detecting content and functionality on a site, such as URLs, forms, and AJAX requests.
Burp Intruder: Burp Intruder is a tool for automating customized attacks against web apps. It has many powerful features for attacking various web application components, including brute force attacks and manipulating parameter values. In addition, the intruder tool allows you to create standard attack strings with payload positions where you want data to change between requests.
Burp gives you complete control, combining advanced manual techniques with state-of-the-art automation to make your work faster, more effective, and fun.
DNS Discovery allows organizations to discover, map, and monitor all of their internet-facing systems without credentials. It does so by creating a fingerprint of your organization’s unique DNS infrastructure. This fingerprint is a comprehensive list of subdomains and IP addresses that belong to your organization. So, for example, with DNS Discovery, you can:
Discover potentially vulnerable or compromised (e.g., misconfigured assets).
Map out all cloud assets, including virtual machines, mail servers and databases, web servers, and other exposed services.
Monitor the addition or removal of new assets in real-time.
DNS Discovery analyzes the network traffic and its subdomains to identify all public-facing hosts based on requests made by users or other internal hosts to those hosts. It includes a wide range of techniques for discovering domains and subdomains, including crawling for links to new domains, analyzing emails sent from the domain for URLs mentioned, analyzing documents from the domain (such as PDFs), and extracting domains from JavaScript files loaded from the domain and more.
Wapiti is a vulnerability scanner designed to audit web applications.
Wapiti allows you to audit the security of your websites or web applications. It performs “black-box” scans, i.e., it does not study the application’s source code but scans the webpages of the deployed web app, looking for scripts and forms where it can inject data. Once it gets this list, Wapiti acts like a fuzzer, injecting payloads to see if a script is vulnerable.
Wapiti can detect the following vulnerabilities :
• File disclosure
• Database injection
• XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) injection in the HTTP response (reflected).
• XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) injection in HTML tags attributes value.
• Code injection (eval(), system(), passtru()…).
• Command execution detection (backticks).
• Blind SQL Injection using a time delay.
• Weak .htaccess configurations.
Bugcrowd has a history of innovation. They’ve always been proud of being early adopters and disruptors in cybersecurity. However, over the last couple of years, they’ve seen an increase in demand for their services from small businesses. These companies don’t necessarily have huge budgets or the resources to staff their security teams fully, but they know how important security is. So they want to find low-hanging fruit before it becomes a more significant issue down the road.
That’s where Discovery comes in. It’s designed for organizations who need help getting started with their security programs and want to get a snapshot of their current vulnerabilities without breaking the bank.
The best part? It’s free!
Google Dorks is a slang term for advanced Google searches to find helpful information. The term “dork” was slang for a “fool” or someone who is ineffectual. However, it has recently come to mean a “wizard,” or someone who performs magic tricks. So while it sounds like these are fools that Google has hired, the reality is that these are wizards who use Google to perform tricks.
The dorks listed here are designed to show you what information is publicly available on the Internet. They should be used to show you how vulnerable your data is and how easy it can be for someone else to access it. These tricks can also be used to develop your tools and automation using the Google Search Engine API.
It’s important to note that these techniques aren’t illegal, but the information gathered might be used illegally or without your consent and knowledge.
iNalyzer, is the application that allows you to analyze all the aspects of iOS apps.
It is a tool that helps you discover, track, and review all the apps from one place.
In addition, it provides the following features.
App rank: The app rank shows the App’s popularity worldwide in real-time. The rank includes the App Store category, App Store country, and overall rank.
Real-time App reviews monitoring and analysis: iNalyzer will provide you with real-time monitoring of your App’s reviews and ratings. This feature will help you find out what people are saying about your apps in all stores worldwide. You can also view your app reviews in different languages.
App review analytics: Analyze reviews in different countries, devices, OS versions, and even languages to get deep insights into your users and their needs.
wfuzz is a tool designed for bruteforcing Web Applications, it can be used for finding resources not linked (directories, servlets, scripts, etc), bruteforce GET and POST parameters for checking different kind of injections (SQL, XSS, LDAP, etc), bruteforce Forms parameters (User/Password), Fuzzing, etc.
It also allows to fuzz potential URLs by using payloads from files and has features to update the payloads while the fuzzing process is running.
The tool has a simple structure, and with the help of some tutorials, you will be able to create compelling scripts in python that will take full advantage of wfuzz capabilities.
wfuzz can be easily extended with plugins or external scripts.
Shodan is the world’s first search engine for Internet-connected devices. It works like Google, except that it lets you search for specific types of computers (routers, servers, etc.) connected to the Internet using various filters. Some have also described it as a search engine of service banners, which are meta-data the server sends back to the client.
Shodan has servers located worldwide that crawl the Internet 24/7 to provide the latest Internet intelligence. The collected data set contains information about webcams, routers, printers, smart TVs, etc. In addition, it’s used by penetration testers to identify possible targets when assessing networks for security vulnerabilities. In this article, I will share how you can use Shodan to gather all sorts of information about device locations, operating systems, and open ports for your ethical hacking projects.
Here are some key features of Shodan:
Ability to search by an operating system (Windows XP or Linux), geo-location (Country or City), port (FTP or HTTP), and hostname (pc1 or server).
IP addresses are automatically saved in your account to keep track of exciting devices easily.
Nuclei is a tool to quickly scan endpoints for potential vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other issues. The tool is built modular and has a large collection of modules to choose from. These modules can be either HTTP or GRPC-based.
HTTP Modules: HTTP Modules are used to scan for vulnerabilities or misconfigurations on web endpoints or API endpoints. These modules are written in Go Language and contain the Go templating engine, which can be used to send custom payloads. The Go templating engine supports if/else conditionals, range loops, chaining of variables, and other useful functions to customize requests as per the need of the module author.
GRPC Modules: GRPC modules are used to scan for issues on gRPC endpoints. gRPC is an open-source remote procedure call (RPC) system initially developed at Google in 2015. It uses HTTP/2 for transport, Protocol Buffers as the interface description language, and provides authentication, bidirectional streaming and flow control, blocking or nonblocking bindings, and cancellation and timeouts. In addition, it generates cross-platform client and server bindings for many languages.
Sandmap is an internet-scale search engine and information gathering tool for pentesters, bug hunters, OSINT enthusiasts, and cyber threat intelligence analysts. The tool employs several active and passive techniques to achieve this goal.
Sandmap supports a variety of search options:
Domain name scanning and enumeration. Sandmap retrieves hostnames from various sources (DNS, Passive DNS, Certificate Transparency, etc.) and tests them with many techniques (DNS Zone Transfers, Reverse DNS bruteforcing).
IP address scanning and enumeration. Sandmap scans target IP addresses to retrieve additional hosts, services, and details about the network infrastructure.
Subdomain bruteforcing. Sandmap uses two different techniques for subdomain discovery:
The first method takes advantage of the data retrieved in the domain name and IP address scanning phases. Then, the discovered hosts are used as seed words to perform a fast subdomain bruteforcing using various techniques (DNS Zone Transfers, Reverse DNS bruteforcing).
The second method performs a standard subdomain bruteforcing using a large wordlist, similar to other tools like Knockpy or DNScan. This technique is slower than the one described above.
Frequenly Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q. Which companies have bug bounty programs?
Following companies which have bug bounty programs:
• Paypal
• Dropbox
• Yahoo! (now merged with Oath)
• Mozilla
• Snapchat
• Yelp!
Q. How long does it take to find a bug in a bug bounty?
It depends on the size of the scope, domain, API, and mobile App. The larger the target (scope), the harder it will be to find a bug.
It also depends on your level of experience as a bug bounty hunter. If you’ve been doing this for a while, you’re more likely to find bugs faster than someone who started last week.
If you are new to bug bounties, there is no need to worry about it. It’s perfectly normal not to find a bug during your first few weeks of hunting. It takes time, patience, and persistence to progress in this field.
Most security researchers are concerned about the legal side of the bug bounty.
Q. Is bug bounty illegal?
The good news is that it is not illegal. If you find a bug that can be exploited, the company may want to know more about it and ask you to share certain information with them. You can do so through an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) or create a proof of concept, which is a demonstration of how the bug works. The company will then decide if they want to fix it or not. Your name will be mentioned on their Hall of Fame page if they do.
