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How I Turned a Simple Python Script Into Profit
A Beginner’s Guide to Automating Bug Bounty Discovery
I kept reading about massive bug bounty payouts, but felt completely overwhelmed. The techniques sounded complex, and manual testing was too slow.
Then, I had a realization: I didn’t need to discover new vulnerabilities — I could automate the process of finding known ones. This is the story of how a single Python script grew into a system that earned me over $10,000.
You don’t need to be a security genius; you just need to know how to leverage code.
The strategy wasn’t mine. It was inspired by researchers like Alex Birsan and a philosophy from James Kettle: “The easiest way to get started is to find some promising research by someone else and build on it”. I applied this to Dependency Confusion, and here’s how you can, too.
Part 1: Understanding the Opportunity
Dependency Confusion is a software supply chain vulnerability. Think of a company’s internal package manager like a warehouse robot. It’s told to fetch a part named “internal-package-v2.” If an identical part with a higher version number is available in a public store, the robot can get confused and bring back the wrong, potentially dangerous box.
