It's doable, but if you're good enough to somewhat routinely find bounty-worthy bugs but not spooky good at it, it's not the most lucrative way to put bug-hunting skills to work.

I've noticed a spike recently in bug bounties going to people who using a combination of fuzzing and code analysis tools. It may be that we're moving to a point where bug-hunters' ability to use sophisticated tools will be what earns them the most money, rather than their ability to eyeball code and see the bugs.

Speaking just for myself: A few years ago I was saying "I should really set aside a few months to learn to use fuzzing tools"; now I'm saying "it's easier to just offer bounties and let someone else do the fuzzing for me".

There was this thing called "Hostile Subdomain Takeover" where a company would point a subdomain to a particular SaaS product (Say Zendesk), sometime later, they would cancel their subscription but not change the A record.

Someone could then go and register a new Zendesk account (If the service doesn't require proof of ownership of domain), and say that they want to use the same subdomain. Now they have a Zendesk account with the URL of http://help.somedomain.com as an example. And they can phish people quite easily.

Anyway, the reason I bring it up is because for a while, I saw people spamming the shit out of bug bounties with this stuff. Because it's super simple to do.

So I'm not sure what is more lucrative for an average joe, actually learning proper techniques or trying to piggy back on some low hanging fruit that may be easy to automate.

This is definitely still a thing.

I did this on a popular bug bounty platform. Wrote a tool to look for the top 10 most common issues with mobile apps and auto submit bugs.

Fuzzing is where you are going to find most memory corruption bugs these days, bounties or not.

As those tools become more widely used and more easy to use, you'll be able to lower the mean bug bounty reward payment as well.

And even if you're "spooky good", you only really need to be spooky good for six - 12 months before something like Google Project Zero will pick you up to (in all likelihood) pay you far more anyway.

My understanding is that the grey market for exploits is way more lucrative than the bug bounty programs.

It is in the very specific case that:

(1) You are effective at finding the specific kinds of vulnerabilities that the grey market actually purchases. People have _very_ weird ideas about what the grey market wants. In reality, if your bug isn't a drive-by clientside in a popular client, it is unlikely that anyone wants to buy it.

(2) You are willing to get your hands dirty with shady purchasers. If you're talented, you can make good money in the grey market, or you can retain plausible deniability about what your work is being used for, but you can't do both of those things.

That first case is really the limiting factor. And remember, if you can reliably sell bugs to the grey market, that strongly implies you have lucrative options in the legitimate market. Bug bounties are not the most competitive alternative to the grey market!

> In reality, if your bug isn't a drive-by clientside in a popular client, it is unlikely that anyone wants to buy it.

That sounds like black market buyers (maybe we disagree on where the "gray" line is). Governments are very interested in bugs that allow pivoting and lateral movement.

How would one, hypothetically, go about selling exploits/bugs to governments as a freelancer?

The nature of the work is such that:

1. If you have to ask this question, you are quite far from being able to do it any time soon (and that's assuming you can find the vulnerabilities!),

2. You will predominantly sell your vulnerabilities, preferably weaponized as complete exploits, to firms that specialize in "vulnerability research" and "exploitation development" with close ties to government agencies.

It's much easier to find a firm that can act as a broker between you and the government agency than it is to knock on the right doors to sell it on your own, with no background or prior contact.

Plenty of brokers exist, I'm personally familiar with Exodus Intelligence and Zerodium

I've looked at dartknet markets. Quite often, there are vulnerabilities advertised for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. And quite often, they claim to be an exclusive sale (ie, they'll take it down after one purchase).

And quite often, they will be relisted for months at a time. I'm not at all saying there's no market - we clearly know that a remote code exec on a common server will sell well.

Things like "Microsoft Word Exploit" seem a lot more like Duff beer - I'm often hearing how much they are "for sale" for a fortune but I'm not convinced people are getting the significant sums people refer to on a reliable basis.

I wonder the same thing. The only downside I can see is that the more days that go by while bug-hunting, the more anxious I'll get about not having a consistent biweekly paycheck. It would be a very results-driven career à la sales, but I'm not sure I could take that stress.

If you are legitimately good enough, there are certainly companies out there who will pay you well and consistently to hunt for bugs/vulns.