Intro
This serves as a guide on setting up the necessary tools on a VPS to get started with Bug Bounty Hunting
Walkthrough
Let’s start by setting up our VPS, for the purpose of this tutorial I will use the cloud provider Hetzner and we will select the cheapest configuration however, any cloud provider or home server will suffice. This tutorial will use Hetzner Cloud VPS as an example, running Ubuntu 22.0.4 but the steps should loosely be OS agnostic.
Initial Setup
Now that we have acquired our VPS, let’s setup some foundational infrastructure. We will start by installing ZSH which will provide us with interactive functionality, advanced completion features, history manipulation and several quality of life changes out the box. We will also need to install Go, build tools and nmap as they are a dependency for some of the tools in the Project Discovery suite.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install zsh golang-go build-essential nmap
Following this, I like to also install oh-my-zsh
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"
One of the tools found in the Project Discovery suite requires massdns to be installed:
git clone https://github.com/blechschmidt/massdns
cd massdns
cp ./bin/massdns /usr/bin
Finally, make sure to export PATH and GOPATH by adding the following lines to your ~/.zshrc file
export GOPATH="$HOME/go"
export PATH="$PATH:$GOPATH/bin"
ProjectDiscovery Installation
ProjectDiscovery produces a suite of open source tools tailored for offensive security: security engineers, bug bounty hunters, and red teamers. We are most interested in the PDTM repository.
We will now build and install the packages from the repo:
go install https://github.com/projectdiscovery/pdtm/cmd/pdtm@latest
Now let’s install the available tools by running:
pdtm -ia
Conclusion
Once installed, we are ready to begin developing our Bug Bounty Hunting methodology.
This tutorial was inspired by Nahamsec and his Recon Course and Methodology video