Jul 12, 2021
BugBountyHunter.com opened early November 2020 and the amount of growth we have seen in members has been phenomenal! Members have been using BARKER to build confidence with testing web applications and leaving no stone unturned, with the end goal to apply this mindset on bug bounty programs..
0xblackbird, YouGina, JTCSec and HolyBugx have been members from very early on and have shown great progress, but recently they paused testing on BARKER and got together to collaborate on a chosen bug bounty program. I sat down with them to ask them a few questions about their collaboration, get to know them better and to see how things were going.
ZSEANO: Firstly, introduce yourself and tell us a bit about yourself:
JTCSec: My name is James and my day job is as a member of a Cybersecurity team doing incident response, SIEM management/Use Case development, and managing the Threat Intelligence program. I got into Web Application security in college, where I was studying for my Bachelors degree in Computer Security. There were several Cybersecurity clubs on campus and one of them was hosting a red team/blue team competition that other schools could send teams too (ISTS). Basically, each team was a blue team made of students with assets to protect and tasks to complete, but they could attack other teams as well. Additionally, there was a red team made up of pros (including members of companies who sponsored the competition) and they did they’re best to mess with everyone. I assisted with creating injects by creating a vulnerable web application that the blue teams were supposed to stand up, protect, and then audit for vulnerabilities — I purposely built in an RCE so that if a blue team found it, they could own other teams servers if they didnt properly protect the app (unfortunately, no one found it 🙁 ). That experience was a crash course in web development and web application vulnerabilities, so from there I got more and more interested in trying my hand against proper targets.
0xblackbird: Hello! I’m 0xblackbird, and I’m a 16 years old bug bounty hunter from Belgium. I got into hacking almost two years ago and started participating in bug bounties about a year and a half ago. Before that, I was just a game developer and an animator, but that didn’t last long. Right after I quit animating, I started to develop interests in cybersecurity. I found it really cool to be an ethical hacker and hack for good while also earning awesome rewards! So I came across thecybermentor’s Full Ethical Hacking course, the best free course at that time! I’m currently not following anything computer-related in school, so I took the course and learned everything in my free time after school. That’s where I started learning the basics of networking, Linux, and cybersecurity. A few months after completing the course, I started to focus on web application hacking. I enjoyed it a lot, and I still do of course! That was the reason why I went for doing bug bounties!
HolyBugx: So a brief introduction about myself, I just turned 20, I started bug bounties back in August 2020 (8 months now) with no backgrounds, well since I was a kid I was in love with computers and hacking but never tried to do it as a profession until when I turned 19, I took a step forward and took some basic networking and security courses and I quickly realized my passion in hacking goes to web security, so I started my career as a bug bounty hunter.
YouGina: My name is Christiaan but in the community, I am commonly known as YouGina. I have been interested in development and security ever since primary school (about ten years old I guess) and continued doing both during middle school, making and breaking different websites, applications, and other stuff. After middle school I got my CEH certification via EC-Council and later ECSA and LPT as well. I have learned about bug bounties back in 2014 already when HackerOne just started, though I have only been actively hunting since recent years. Now when I look back at it, I wish I had started directly back then since it turned out to be such a fun thing to do.