Story of my first cash bounty on hackerone.

Hello again bugbounty community! My name is Vedant(Also known as Vegeta on Twitter😁) and I’m a cybersecurity enthusiast and an aspiring Bug hunter :) Today I’ll share with you a story about an interesting bug that I found recently which helped me get my first bounty on hackerone platform. I am sure you will like it, so without any further ado let’s get started.

Since I started learning about bug bounty I’ve always thought that Hackerone is the toughest platforms and it will be very hard to find a valid bug there. But in the beginning of this year I decided that I’ll focus more on Hackerone platform and try to get at least one bug triaged and yeah I did that. After dedicating almost 3 months on H1 I was ranked 53rd on country based leaderboard and that really boosted my confidence so my next goal was to get my first bounty so I decided to hack on a bug bounty program.

So I chose a target which had only main web application in scope. Every time when I start the recon on such target I gather lots of endpoints using waybackurls, but this time I decided to try something else. I used Linkfinder tool for the first time and the command was,

python linkfinder.py -i https://example.com -d

When the execution completed I started going through the results one by one. There were lots of URLs and after almost 10 mins one URL got my attention it was like the following,

htttps://www.example.com/image?Id=somelinkwithouthttp.com

So the above URL really got me curious as there was not http:// or https:// . After seeing such parameters which accept URLs as an argument most bug hunters will go for SSRF and I did the same. I quickly fired up the Burp collaborator copied one payload and without prepending http or https I just pasted it in that Id parameter and hit enter expecting for a SSRF but sadly I got the following response in my collaborator.

I got only DNS request 😔. After trying some things I got an idea. I decided to prepend @ symbol in my collaborator payload(I don’t know how I got that idea I just did it spontaneously😂) and I hit enter and this time surprisingly I got the following response,

The IP was of AWS so I tried to fetch the AWS-metadata and I tried lots and lots of different techniques(Like redirect, DNS rebinding etc.) for almost 3–4 days but nothing worked. I decided to report this anyways and after 2 days I got response from triager saying that I need to show the impact. I was really frustrated at this point.

So next day with fresh mind I decided to give it another try. This time I tried to chain the SSRF with some bug. As that parameter was fetching an image I tried to use the brutelogic’s XSS POC link. And guess what? It worked! The XSS popped up😁. I used the following payload:-

As the poc.svg was fetched successfully I tried to create a HTML file which contained a XSS payload to steal the victim’s session cookies. I created that file and used ngrok to host it on my local host. So for testing this exploit I created 2 accounts on that site and tried using that payload and yeah! It worked!!! I got the victim’s cookies😎. I used the following code:-

I quickly reported this to the program and within one day the report was triaged and after almost 20 days I was rewarded my very first bounty on HackerOne ! I learned lots of new things while finding and exploiting this issue. If you have any doubts regarding this write-up you can ping me here

I hope you learned something new by reading this write-up and if you want you can buymeacoffee 😇. Thank you for reading this. Until next time, good bye and happy hacking!