About a yer ago my friend/coworker and I started a monthly hacker meet up called The Dark Corner (https://www.meetup.com/The-Dark-Corner). At the meet up I met a bug hunter named Mike (https://twitter.com/taksec). A few months ago he helped renew my interest in bug bounties which had waned after all my submissions to both bugcrowd and hackerone turned out to be duplicates. This included an issue where it was possible to read arbitrary files as the root user on of the servers (https://hackerone.com/reports/130661).
Mike let me know about the self managed public bug bounty program for Alibaba, on which he had already been rewarded for some pretty severe issues. He was kind enough to share with me some of his recon which included a nice set of domains to get started looking at. Alibaba doesn’t publish a scope but basically all their business units are in scope, which according to one email the security team sent me consists of 100+ domains.
I found my first bug pretty quickly. Another dupe!!! I was definitely ready to swear off bug bounties for good at this point! However, getting to see Mike’s experience with the program first hand, and having his encouragement I kept looking. That would be last dupe.
Since February I have had exactly 66 reports accepted by Alibaba and risen to the #1 spot on the scoreboard. This experience has been a lot of fun and very rewarding, not only monetarily, but in terms of helping me become a better hacker.
So with all that said I want give a big thanks to Mike, Fabius, Luis, Allen, Illumant (https://www.illumant.com), and everyone who has given me support and guidance getting to this point.
