My First Bug: A Unique $500 XSS.

Hi, my name is Hassan Bashir. I am 14 years old and started bug bounty when I was 13. After 7 months of hard work and dedication, I have gotten my first paid bug on a private program.

One evening after taking a shower, I thought let’s try to find a bug for real now. I opened BurpSuite, turned on some music, and opened a private program’s main domain, which we will call www.target.com. I logged into my testing account, and clicked just one button, “Add to Cart”, and intercepted the request using Burp Proxy. I checked Burp history, and before the Add to Cart actual request, there was another POST request that was being made through api.target.com. I sent the request to the repeater and inspected it, there was some URL Encoded JSON data inside a parameter named param. Basically, the request was bringing some known data about the product that I was adding to the cart. I noticed some data was reflected in the response. The response was in JSON, but the Content-Type was set to HTML!!! As I’m pretty dumb, I thought the JSON data was inside a script tag, which it wasn’t. I tried exiting the JSON data in response which did not work. Later when I finally realized, that the JSON data was printed straight to HTML document without any tags, I tried adding <h1> tag, and to my surprise, it worked!!! The <h1> tag was reflected in the response body just as expected, after running it in the browser it was confirmed that an XSS was possible. But this XSS wasn’t as simple. I noticed api.target.com is only accessible if the referer header is set to any subdomain/domain of target.com, plus, because of it being POST-Based Reflected XSS, I had to send a request to that endpoint using a website owned by me, but Origin header would have blocked any request from other domains. This seemed like a big problem, but I had a trick up my sleeve. I had an idea, I first checked if I could change the POST request to GET request, and thankfully it worked! Even with GET request, the <h1> tag was reflected! Now I went to https://account.target.com/login?redirect=https://account.target.com/home and put the vulnerable link in the redirect parameter! The link looked like something like https://account.target.com/login?redirect=https://api.target.com/file?param={"data":"<h1>"} Now, once I logged in to my account, account.target.com would redirect me to https://api.target.com/file?param={"data":"<h1>"} with the referer header and origin header both set to account.target.com, allowing the victim to enter the vulnerable link!

Entering a <script> tag would be blocked by the WAF, so I tried bypassing the WAF in order to achieve a full-blown Reflected XSS. After about 6 hours of bypassing, I came up with a payload <input+type=text+onbeforeinput=location=’https://asd.com'><!-- which, I don’t think would ever have been triaged if I reported that. Once the HTML code loads, the victim would have to enter any data in a form, and they would have been redirected to https://asd.com. I could not find a WAF and asked my real brother for collaboration (he is a much better hacker than me, top 500 in the world and top 50 in my country), and he accepted to collaborate. I sent all the details and information I had gathered yet, and BOOM! Within 2 hours he found the bypass!!! The payload looked like <%s%v%g+%on%l%oad%=c%o%nf%i%rm%(1%)><!--! I had achieved a valid XSS most likely to be triaged because of all the bypasses. The final link looked like: https://account.target.com/login?redirect=https://api.target.com/file?param={"data":"<%s%v%g+%on%l%oad%=c%o%nf%i%rm%(1%)><!--"}.

After the report was done, in just a day, the report got triaged, and the bounty was rewarded after about 5 days of it being triaged. This was my first bug and after so much hard work I had finally achieved something in my life! The total payment was $750, and with division between me and my brother, I was awarded $500.

Credits:

My Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/f3tch.169/

My Discord: ! [f3tch]#7375

My Brother’s Website: http://meetshoaib.com/

Thanks for reading till the end! I hope you learnt something.