Early in my bug hunting journey, I made a rookie mistake —

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I’d fire up automated scanners and brute-force my way through targets, hoping to stumble upon vulnerabilities. Then I had an epiphany: 90% of successful hacking happens before you send your first payload.

What changed everything? Mastering reconnaissance.

They make three critical errors:

1. They only check maindomain.com and ignore the hidden attack surface
2. They rely solely on automated tools without manual investigation
3. They skip historical data that reveals forgotten vulnerabilities

Here’s the method that helped me find 100+ bugs across Fortune 500 companies — all through smart recon.

1. The Acquisition Goldmine
Companies often forget about systems from acquired businesses. I once found:

• legacy.bought-company.com still running WordPress 4.0 (unpatched)