How I accidentally found my first bug

Hello guys, this is my first blog and I have tried it to make it as simple as possible so everyone can understand.

I started learning ethical hacking on my own. So it was quite tough for me. For learning I was reading reports, blogs, watching POCs, doing some courses from udemy, etc. Also I started hacking on a live program from hackerone. I found brute-forcing vulnerability, but it turned out to be a duplicate. I was like yay I found a bug but this wasn’t a complex bug to find because there is no complex logic or technique in brute-forcing so I don’t count it as my first bug because anyone can do brute-forcing. It’s a simple logic. Right! I didn’t found any vulnerability in about month or two apart from brute-forcing. So I was starting to get a little frustrated.

So one day I was just looking disclosed reports of a program of hackerone and I found an XSS report. In that report the security researcher had mentioned that the website was not properly handling double quotes. So, I visited the vulnerable link and I inserted a double quote and a single quote. The double quote now was properly handled because the report got resolved but the single quote was not properly being handled. Now, I was like WHOA!!! I can get out of the syntax. Lets try for XSS.

So I inserted single quote and broke out from the syntax and inserted my XSS payload. The payload was like http://www.website.com/video.asp?v=-alert(document.cookie),// and the XSS payload got fired.

Finally VICTORY !!!

Takeaway: When you think that the bug is fixed, it doesn’t mean that now it is not vulnerable. “The bug is always mitigated, not fixed”.

THANK YOU :)