Let’s be real. We’ve all seen those mind-blowing bug bounty write-ups on Twitter. The ones that make you wonder, “How did they even think of that?” I used to feel the same way. Then I found a vulnerability that changed my perspective entirely. It wasn’t a complex, chain-exploitation zero-day. It was something much simpler, and because of that, much more common.

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I want to pull back the curtain and show you the exact, practical steps behind a find that involved a desktop app and a secret it was never supposed to have. This is a hands-on guide, the kind I wish I had when I started.

The “Aha!” Moment: It’s All in the Box

The target was a desktop application built with Electron. If you’ve ever used Slack, Discord, or VS Code, you’ve used an Electron app. Developers love it because they can build desktop software using web tech — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

But here’s the thing every hacker needs to know: that beautiful, packaged app you download is basically a box holding all its source code. And sometimes, the developers accidentally leave the key to the kingdom inside that box.

My journey started with a simple question: “What’s actually in this thing?”