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It Returned 404… But the Data Was Still There

2 min readOct 3, 2026

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Hello Hacker👋

In this article, I’d like to share a bug I discovered while performing reconnaissance on a target. I came across a page that returned a 404 response, but the HTTP requests told a different story.

When testing a target. while performing reconnaissance. I found a page and returned 404. But the HTTP requests had other ideas.

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I started with some basic reconnaissance, using waybackurl and katana to collect endpoints to test. While going through the collected endpoints, I noticed something interesting: there were several admin-related pages.

Once the tool finished, I filtered the results to display only the URLs containing “admin”.

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I reloaded the page normally and noticed that a table appeared and disappeared in less than a second, so I couldn’t see its contents.

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I opened Burp Suite and found the surprise: the response contained all the employee data.

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At that point, I understood how the site worked. It calls api/get-users and checks whether you are authorized to access the endpoint. If you are not authorized, it returns a 404.

I reached out to the person responsible for the website because they didn’t have a bug bounty program. I reported the vulnerability to him so he could fix it as soon as possible.

⚠️ Disclaimer: I do not recommend testing or working on a website without proper authorization to do so.

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