The present-day cybersecurity landscape is affected by an ever-expanding attack surface, which can exploit weak security architectures. Companies are at continuous risk of security attacks on their web assets, and one of the most coordinated methods to secure those assets is to conduct bug bounty programs.
As a reason, bug bounty hunting is one of the fast-rising ways ethical hackers can make a decent living. For the majority of bug bounty hackers, the only way to learn how to hack is through online resources and blogs on how to find security bugs. The field of bug bounty hunting is not something that conventional colleges provide training on. So, if you are looking to find some courses that help you get started with bug bounty hunting, here we list down the top sources.
Website Hacking/Penetration Testing & Bug Bounty Hunting
Website Hacking/Penetration Testing & Bug Bounty Hunting is one of the most popular courses on Udemy for bounty hunting and website penetration. The course is developed by Zaid Al-Quraishi, ethical hacker, and the founder of zSecurity. The course has been enrolled by more than 430,000 students on Udemy. The bug bounty hunting course teaches learners on the various concepts and hacking tools in a highly practical manner.
Even those who have no prior knowledge on ethical hacking can enrol this course, and learn enough fundamentals by the end of the course to hack & discover bugs in websites, and secure them like security experts.
The course is split into a number of segments; each segment comprises topics such as discovering, exploiting and preventing common web application vulnerabilities. Students then receive advanced techniques to bypass security, escalate privileges, access the database, and even utilise the hacked websites to penetrate other websites on the same server. All of the vulnerabilities included in the course are very prevalent in bug bounty programs and are included in OWASP Top 10.
The Complete Ethical Hacking Course: Beginner to Advanced!
Developed by Ermin Kreponic, this Udemy course has seen more than 272,000 students enrolling and is one of the most sought after courses on ethical hacking and penetration testing. The course goes from basics to advanced level, and therefore, needs careful studying and practising.
As part of The Complete Ethical Hacking Course: Beginner to Advanced, you get to learn the basics of Linux, installing Kali Linux, Nmap, Tor, Proxychains, VPN, using VirtualBox, Macchanger, WiFi Hacking, DoS attacks, SLL strip, all known vulnerabilities, SQL injections, and more topics that are added every month.
Learners can take up this course with any level of knowledge and quickly start advancing your skills as an ethical hacker, bug bounty hunter, and security expert. Learners get trained on how to penetrate networks, exploit systems, break into computers, routers, etc.
Hacker101
Hacker101 is a compilation of videos, resources, and hands-on exercises which assist learners in all the techniques to operate as a bug bounty hunter. The learning course material is open to learning for free from HackerOne website. Designed by HackerOne’s Cody Brocious, the Hacker101 material is perfect for beginners through to intermediate hackers.
Being a free educational resource on the Hacker101 website, it was developed by HackerOne to support the hacker community. Hacker101 contains video lessons and curated modules to assist learners with the concepts of hacking and a Capture the Flag, where students can apply theory into practice.
The Hacker101 CTF (Capture the Flag) is a game where learners hack through different levels to detect bits of data known as flags. These flags trace the learners’ progress and equip them to receive invites to private programs on HackerOne — the biggest bug bounty platforms in the world.
While there are no prerequisites for Hacker101, it is advised that learners have programming skills in JavaScript, Python, and SQL. Along with that, knowledge on expertise such as setting up Kali Linux on Virtualbox and networking knowledge is considered helpful to get started.
Bug Bounty Hunting – Offensive Approach to Hunt Bugs
The course is designed by Vikash Chaudhary, a prominent Indian hacker and is available on Udemy. The course teaches learners from the very basic to advanced levels, like how to gather information, basic terminologies in bug bounty hunting and penetration testing. Then it continues to topics like Burpsuite and the techniques of using it efficiently. This is followed by XSS, both in theory and in detailed practical lessons using live websites. It contains studying all the bugs, ones which can be detected with medium risk to high-level vulnerability risks.
The course includes topics like URL redirections to parameter tampering, HTML injections, SQL injections, command injection, file uploading, and many more vulnerabilities in practical hand-on manner. Overall, it’s one of the best courses, which is very detailed with Live Bug Bounty Hunting. While in-depth knowledge of IT is not required, learners may still need to have a fundamental knowledge of IT basics to follow the explanations under the course smoothly.
