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I Found 15 Critical Vulnerabilities in One Afternoon
The adrenaline rush of a successful bug bounty hunt, followed by the weight of responsibility.
It was supposed to be a routine Wednesday. I had a few hours between meetings, my coffee was still warm, and I decided to poke around a new bug bounty program on HackerOne. The target was a mid-sized SaaS platform — nothing massive, but with a complex API that looked promising.
I expected to spend an hour or two doing some basic reconnaissance before moving on to other things. I didn’t expect to break the application in fifteen distinct ways before the sun went down.
This isn’t a post to brag. I’m not a wizard, and the target wasn’t a poorly coded toy. This post is about pattern recognition, methodology, and the compounding nature of vulnerabilities. When you find one flaw, it often exposes the next.
If you are an aspiring bug bounty hunter or a developer looking to secure your own applications, this breakdown of my afternoon might offer some valuable insights into how critical flaws hide in plain sight.
