Let me paint you a picture. It’s 2 AM. Another hunter in the Discord server pops off about a crazy RCE chain. You sigh, feeling like you’ll never find the big one. Sound familiar?
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I used to feel that way. Then I stopped chasing the hype and started cashing in on the vulnerabilities everyone else was too busy to notice. I’m talking about the boring, unsexy bugs: Information Disclosure.
While everyone is hammering the main application for SQLi, I’m quietly collecting bounties for exposed source code, forgotten developer files, and misconfigured servers. This is my not-so-secret playbook.
The Mindset Shift: Stop Hunting for Vulnerabilities, Start Hunting for Secrets
The goal isn’t to find a vulnerability in the code. The goal is to find the information that leads to a vulnerability. It’s digital reconnaissance. A single leaked API key isn’t a bug; it’s the key to the kingdom.
Real-World Example: The Staging Site That Paid My Rent
I was poking around a fintech company’s assets. Their main app was a fortress. But I found staging.customer.fintech.com. It returned a blank page. Most people would leave. I ran a simple curl command: