Payload in the Haystack: Using Wayback & ParamSpider to Find a Forgotten Upload Endpoint

Free Link 🎈

Hey there!😁

Image by Gemini AI

It was 3AM. My coffee had gone cold. My VSCode had crashed for the 4th time. And the only thing more broken than my sleep schedule was my Wi-Fi.

But hey — that’s when the real magic happens, right? Late night + recon = either full pwn or full disappointment.

This one turned out to be the former.

What started as a boring ParamSpider + Wayback combo hunt turned into a beautiful ZIP Slip exploit and a bounty that funded three months of Maggi noodles 🍜.

Let me walk you through how a forgotten /upload endpoint hidden deep in Wayback led me to a shell in a haystack.

While running the usual recon combo, I did:

subfinder -d target.com -o subs.txt
httpx -l subs.txt -title -tech-detect -o live.txt
gauplus -subs target.com -o gau.txt
cat live.txt | waybackurls >> all_urls.txt
paramspider -d target.com -o params.txt