Understanding and How it Works Bug Hunter

Every company that is closely related to technology, such as Google, Meta, Quora, and Mozilla, of course, needs a bug hunter to run a bug bounty program. The activities carried out by bug hunters from this program are to help identify and fix bugs in the application.

Not surprisingly, this program is aimed at hunters who have high skills. This is because they need to master various components, such as proxies, web browsers, virtual machines, and so on.

What is Bug Hunter?

Hunter bugs is a term addressed to someone who works in finding bugs in a system or application. In practice, bug hunters run a program known as a bug bounty program.

This bug bounty program itself has been widely used by large companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. Later, the company will provide attractive offers to bug hunters if they find problems with their applications.

So in other words, bug bounty programs run by bug hunters are paid activities to find vulnerabilities in software, websites, and web applications. This is done because not all IT security teams in the company have enough time to deal with the many bugs that are experienced.

Because its existence is very much needed, this bug hunter profession can get paid up to tens of thousands of dollars per year. Nevertheless, there are several requirements that must be possessed by a bug hunter, namely high curiosity, technical expertise in web and networking, to the ability to solve problems.

How the Bug Hunter Works

If you look at the explanation above, you can of course know that a bug hunter is not an easy profession to live in. Therefore, it is important for those of you who are interested in this profession to know how bug hunters work. How this bug hunter works can be studied further, so that in the future you will have your own image.

The first thing you need to know is how the application works and what the architecture of the application is. You can start by knowing the basics of applications and web, such as HTML, CSS, PHP to JavaScript.

In addition, a strong understanding of improving and analyzing bug problems is also needed by a bug hunter. That’s why, there are several components needed to become a bug hunter, including:

• Local & Remote file inclusion
• Information Disclosure
• Remote Code Execution (RCE)
• Information gathering
• SQL Injections
• Cross-Site Scripting (CSS)
• Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF)

For a clearer picture, one of the people who works as a bug hunter is James Kettle. Because of his expertise, James is able to find code errors that criminals might find to break into network systems and steal data.

In the process, James needed 50 hours to test a bug so that it was completely valid and there were no errors. Today, James is one of the bug hunters at Hasker One, a service that works with companies and governments looking for experts to test their software.

Difference between Bug Hunter and Hacker

At first glance, you will think that bug hunters are similar to hackers. In fact, these two terms have significant differences, because bug hunters have a more positive value than hackers. Nevertheless, there are also some hackers who really work without harming others.

More specifically, a hacker is someone who has programming skills and uses them to carry out acts of theft of personal or company data. Meanwhile, a bug hunter is someone who has programming skills but uses them to find and report bugs to a company.

Therefore, bug hunters are considered more useful and do no harm to anyone compared to hackers. So, don’t be surprised, if until now bug hunter has become a profession desired by some people who work in the world of technology.

Bug Bounty Program List

Previously, it was explained that the bug bounty program is a program run by bug hunters. In more detail, a bug bounty program is an opportunity offered by organizations, websites or software developers to individuals to report bugs.

Please note that every bug bounty program curated by a reputable company has rewards that will be given to bug hunters. Want to know what are the bug bounty program lists from big companies? The following is the information, namely:

1. Google. Google’s bug bounty program offers a minimum payout of $300 to a top prize of $31,337 for Google apps.
2. Quora. The bug bounty program on Quora offers a minimum payout of $100 to $7000 for finding and reporting bugs in their app.
3. Mozilla. Mozilla’s bug bounty program offers payouts of $500 to $5000 to find bugs in Mozilla services, such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and other applications and services.
4. Microsoft. Microsoft’s bug bounty program offers payouts of $15,000 to $250,000 for finding critical bugs.
5. Twitter. The bug bounty program on Twitter offers programs that start from $140 to $15000.

Bug Bounties and Benefits for Bug Hunters

Bug bounty is a program like a prize contest held by certain companies so that bug hunters can find loopholes and weaknesses in a system.

For anyone who manages to find a bug in the system, a bug hunter will be rewarded with a certain amount.

For example, there is one company that has implemented this bug bounty program, namely Shopify. Shopify company as an e-commerce provider and online store prioritizes security as a business success. So far, Shopify has paid out more than $1.58 million to bug hunters and offered to submit bug hunters.

In December 2020, a hacker discovered a bug, a critical vulnerability that allowed unauthorized access to merchant accounts. Because of this bug bounty, the hacker finally reported to Shopify to immediately patch right on Christmas Eve which incidentally became one of the biggest shopping days in the world of e-commerce.

How to Become a Bug Hunter

Although in the previous discussion it was stated that not just anyone can become a bug hunter, meaning that only people with special skills can eventually become bug hunters.

Then, how do you become a bug hunter, huh?

To become a reliable bug hunter, of course, GudPeople must prepare several things. Launching from the Pusdatin Kemdikbud, there are six things that must be owned by anyone who wants to become a bug hunter:

1. Computer Networking or computer network
2. OWASP Top 10 Web App Security Risks
3. programming
4. Web Technologies
5. reporting
6. Mindset Hackers

The hacker mindset referred to here is not a feeling of wanting to do evil, but rather growing curiosity about the application or system used and finally trying existing features to find security holes.

You have learned about bug hunters in this article. If you look at the workings of bug hunters who find loopholes, of course this is no different from hackers who also find loopholes to do evil.

So, is it true that bug hunters and hackers are the same profession?

Is it true that the Bug Hunter is the Same as the Hacker?

Actually, the term bug hunter can also be called an ethical hacker. Ethical hackers is a hacker who has expertise but to help others to avoid black hat hacker attacks.

As discussed in the article about hackers, there are types of hackers with different characteristics and ways of working, which include ethical hackers.

So, both ethical hackers and black hat hackers are actually ‘one family’ in terms of expertise in finding loopholes and weaknesses in a system, it’s just that their nature is very different like black and white.

However, in terms of discussing this bunter bug, of course ethical hackers or bug hunters are much more useful when compared to hackers who often commit cyber crimes.