How Beginners Can Build Bug Bounty Skills in the AI Era

Summary

This sponsored guide offers practical advice for learning bug bounty skills: practise in authorized labs, verify findings with evidence, use AI for hints, and write reproducible reports. It also discusses changing submission quality at curl and Google programs.

Key points

• The article says curl’s confirmed-vulnerability share fell from above 15% in previous years to below 5% starting in 2025, then returned to about 15%–16% in April.
• It reports that curl’s bounty program uncovered 87 confirmed vulnerabilities and paid researchers more than $100,000 over its lifetime.
• The article says Google’s pause affects some programs, while supply-chain submissions and outstanding reports remain unaffected.
• It recommends learning networking, operating-system, and web fundamentals, then practising in authorized environments.
• It advises using AI for targeted explanations or hints after attempting a task, then repeating the exercise without assistance.
• A useful vulnerability report should include scope, reproduction steps, expected and actual behavior, supporting evidence, and demonstrated impact.
• The guide recommends having a peer reproduce a lab finding—or repeating it from a fresh setup—to check that the report is clear.

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