How I Climbed to #1 Hacker

How I Climbed to #1 Hacker: Recon to Sensitive Data to Broken Access

Every hacker has their secret sauce—mine is JavaScript recon. It’s where I thrive, and this story is a testament to the power of persistence and creativity in bug bounty hunting.

It all started with a private program. I kicked things off with recon, scanning for the usual suspects—subdomains, misconfigurations, open directories. But after hours of digging, nothing stood out.

That’s when I pivoted to my strong suit: JavaScript recon. Within 30 minutes of diving into their JS files, the first crack appeared—a goldmine of sensitive information:

I had certainty this was going somewhere big.

I turned my attention to the exposed endpoint. My first request, sent without authorization, got me a cold 401 Unauthorized. No surprise there. But I wasn’t giving up that easily. I added an Authorization header with the API key (Bearer <key>) .

Boom—200 OK. I was in.