The 10 Best Bug Bounty Books You Should Read

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There are mainly two reasons why anyone would be involved in Bug Bounty Hunting as a mobile or web hacker.

Either you want to earn a living as a freelance cybersecurity guru or improve your IT vulnerability and flaw-finding skills by gaining experience while being rewarded for your efforts.

Bug bounty hunters get paid to find vulnerability software flaws.

Nevertheless, it is a niche market with various components and requires exceptionally skilled participants. So, how do you enter the Bug Bounty market or improve your effectiveness as a bug hunter?

The answer is straightforward.

First, educate yourself and continuously keep abreast with technology. So, we have researched the best bug bounty books to help you improve your bounty status.

Bug Bounty Hunting Essentials

If you are new to the bug hunting game, this is an excellent book to gain practical knowledge about application security. It covers the fundamentals and moves to various topics and concepts to answer any possible questions you may have as a newbie.

This book could also be essential for the somewhat experienced white-hatter to bring you back to basics. Take a minute and recap on the fundamentals and refresh all the related techniques and tools of your trade. The book’s hands-on approach will guide you to determine your effectiveness and skills.

Starting with the concepts and fundamentals as a base, it continues to more detail on vulnerabilities. For example, they discuss HTML and CRLF injections to understand better these types of attacks and how to secure them. In addition, the authors teach you to write a bug bounty report and analyze vulnerabilities.

The content becomes more practical as you progress through the chapters and explore the bug hunting tools. You will also cover details on bugs in Android and web applications. In addition, touch on blogs and community forums and learn about identifying logic flaws and various research methodologies.

This book is a good read for the aspirant and semi-skilled bug hunter. However, we do not think an experienced white-hat hacker will benefit anything apart from maybe just a good exciting read.

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The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook

This book is the 2^nd edition of this successful and popular book. Web applications are critical to most organizations and, unfortunately, the most vulnerable in modern technology. As an ethical web hacker, you probably need this as a reference tool on your bookshelf.

Not everything in this 900-page book will be new to you, and some portions may have become obsolete, but overall, it is still relevant and an excellent comprehensive handbook for the white-hat Web hacker.

In addition, the monetized practical sessions without a pause option may be annoying to some.

This book covers everything, from newer technology web applications to new attack techniques. It also discusses new frameworks, HTML, hybrid file attacks, and HTTP parm pollution, to name a few. In addition, the authors have a mock website for the end-of-chapter practical exercises.

It emphasizes web application security topics, from discovering to preventing flaws. In addition, it continues into cloud architectures and the impact of attacks because of social networking and others. Even CAPTCHAs and cross-domain stealing are addressed. It’s not perfect, but it is one of the better web reference books available.

Real-World Bug Hunting

Many people prefer practical experiences to pages of just theory. This book caters to those individuals, with every chapter discussing a vulnerability type with a host of real-life bug bounty reports. It is an excellent guide for all bug hunters, novice or skilled, and with a practical approach.

It touches on all the typical bug types, for example, cross-site scripting, insecure direct object references, and others. In addition, real-life case studies of actual application vulnerabilities from Twitter, Facebook, and Google lead all the learning experiences.

The best part of this book relates to the beginner white-hat hackers, who will guide them into an ethical hacking career—starting with internet and web hacking concepts to common website vulnerabilities and how to identify them and report on them.

This book is a great starting point with conceptual explanations and practical studies and makes a fascinating read. There is much detail, and it is presented in a comfortable reading style. You won’t gain new skills from this book, but it can be used to gauge and relate your experiences to other case studies.

The Hacker Playbook 3

A third edition book. Should you want to stay current with up-to-date techniques and strategies, a definite YES. In addition, explanations of recursive vulnerabilities and why they still exist. Are all the preventative safeguards enough? Furthermore, ample discussions on attacks, exploitation tips, and tricks.

This book delves into tools and methods to assist Red Team members to up their game and stays abreast of the newest attack types and mitigation. In essence, you will transform from an offensive ethical hacker to a next-level and more skilled white-hatter.

The current and real-world cyber attack content will expose you to different entry points and custom malware, inclusive of various virtual machines and testing environments. The book also covers attacks on NodeJS, and NoSQL Injection, to name a few, and in addition, it gives tips for bug bounties out there to make some money.

Don’t expect self-coding or back to fundamental theories, but rather exploit the author’s example code in real-life vulnerability sample applications. New or skilled penetration testers should add this book to their bookshelf. We don’t think you will be disappointed.

Black Hat Python

Firstly, it is Python-3 updated, and it is the second edition of this profound book. It introduces the newest, darker strategies to the popular Python hacking tool to benefit your projects. It covers various techniques, such as network sniffers, stealing mail credentials, and many more security strategies.

This book also discusses bit shifting and splitting, offensive forensics with the Volatility Framework, and detailed explanations of the Python libraries. In addition, it touches on other offensive hacking strategies like scraping websites and more. An efficient guide where you will learn trojan server and using GitHub.

A well-written technical read with many good ideas for fun offensive Python projects and even explains tips on the escalation of privileges in Windows. Indeed a recommended book for the security professional or python developer to create robust offensive security.

This book is all about the code. Therefore, the code in this book will still be relevant many years from now. So, get it for your bookshelf now. However, you need some python experience to get the full benefit from this book.

Bug Bounty Bootcamp

Let us cut through the chase. First, this book covers the basics of web application hacking. Starting with the target reconnaissance to vulnerability identifications, finally, how to exploit them. In addition, it covers the various companies’ bug bounty programs to reward white hackers for finding bugs.

This book is ideal for novice ethical hackers, as any boot camp suggests. Therefore, after reading this book, you will understand web hacking concepts, how to find bugs, and how to stay relevant and competitive in the white hat hacking world.

Firstly, learn how to choose a program and what quality bug reports are. Then, you will set up a web hacking lab and capture traffic. Finally, in the third section of this book, you will delve into web application vulnerabilities, for example, XSS and SQL injection.

Lastly, the author covers advanced hacking techniques, discusses mobile applications, and looks at source code examples about security and hacking issues—a definite recommendation as a boot camp book to get into the A to Z of the hacking world.

Bug Bounty Hunting For Web Security

If you are not entirely new to web security but need more info on bug hunting and ethical hacking concepts, this book is for you. The book starts on a low level and discusses web application concepts, technology, and application languages. Similarly, it covers the basics of bug hunting.

As you progress through the book, you will learn about test labs and an introduction to Kali Linux and touch on all the tool types, for example, BurpSuite. Finally, it covers bug presentation reporting, the steps around that, and topics such as forgery injection and header injection, and URL redirection.

The book moves to some higher-level topics such as cross-site scripting, the vulnerabilities, and how to exploit it. In addition, it covers sender policy framework (SPF), unintended XML injection, and command injection. Finally, practical parts are included as you work with malicious files and command injection.

It is a good read covering all the required topics related to white hacking for the novice. There are many competitor books on this level, and the experienced bug bounty hacker won’t gain too much apart from refreshing on concepts and tools.

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A Bug Bounty Hunting Journey

This book is more of a storybook about a bug hunter and her experiences. This book fills the humanity void that exists in the technological and electronic world of the bug hunter. Many successful bug hunters will agree that technical knowledge is key to getting to the top, but you need the correct attitude and mindset.

You will learn and probably relate to what a bug bounty hunter is and what is required but in a relaxed story-telling manner. This 105-page book revolves around Anna, a fictitious Security Engineer who embarks on a bug bounty journey as a newcomer, and it follows all her experiences along the way.

Experience Anna’s world and see the naked truths in relation and maybe get some answers to many questions you may have. In addition, you may even identify with her while receiving a wealth of related knowledge. At the end of the book, you will be presented with a helpful appendix.

We recommend this informative bug bounty hunter story. A quick read, but you will probably refer back to some specific experiences Anna had while on a similar journey. Get away from the technical bits and bytes for a moment and enjoy an entirely related story read.

Corporate Cybersecurity Book

This book is written for corporate cybersecurity and application engineers. It will give them an inside view of the bug bounty hunter’s world. This book is excellent and a must-read to explore the other side of the same coin. Some engineers may also be an eye opener to the vulnerabilities that bug hunters expose daily.

Firstly, it covers an overview of bug bounties, including the program setup and reporting. After that, it discusses all the cybersecurity guidelines and tools helpful to engineers to upskill and become familiar with bug bounty programs. In addition, it touches on security vulnerabilities and encourages research from a corporate perspective.

Other topics include developing and applying security collaboration and understanding safe harbor and SLA. There are also discussions on typical issues that engineers may encounter daily. Most importantly, this book provides information on communication and management follow-through approaches.

It is not only a book about bug bounty programs but also moves to expose the mind of a hacker to the reader. In addition, the engineer and bounty hacker can get a tremendous amount of helpful information from this book. It is recommended.

Bounty Security Hacks 

This book is for cybersecurity professionals and is a collection of the experiences and expertise of more than fifty security researchers and CISOs from different corporates worldwide. These experiences are bundled and presented as use cases and scenarios in this book format.

It covers mainly web applications and cloud security and touches on the modern technology concepts of Blockchain and Cloud (Kubernetes and Docker) security. The latter topics make this book unique as it has not been addressed in real-time scenarios.

Discussions on end and injection points and scenario explanations on XXE, SSRF, and Insecure Deserialization, including good test cases, will be valuable to security research. In addition, this knowledge will assist them in conducting successful interviews for large consulting companies.

Good news. The authors are planning a second book soon that will focus on API penetration testing and machine and deep learning evasion techniques for networks and web app security—a valuable read with real-time case studies and an abundance of info.

Frequently Asked Question

1. How to do Bug bounty hunting

When ethical hackers discover a vulnerability flaw in a website or mobile function, they submit a report to that organization. The organization and the ethical hacker then work together to validate the vulnerability and fix it.

2. Is bug bounty hunting for everyone?

It is for individuals who know cybersecurity so well that they can find flaws and vulnerabilities.

3. What is the average payout for bug bounties?

The payouts are not very high, and the average bug bounty hunter is paid around $200 for discovering a vulnerability.

4. What was the most significant bug bounty ever paid?

About $250,000 was paid to a researcher who discovered a vulnerability bug that could have been catastrophic to the organization.

5. Does LinkedIn pay for bug hunting?

LinkedIn will pay for bounties based on the severity of the issue. They will also combine and group similar flaw findings for single payouts

6. How easy is bug bounty?

Finding a security bug on any company application is not easy, and many top hunters are also testing alongside other hunters in competition for the same reward.

7. Is becoming a bug bounty hunter worth it?

Yes, you may make a good living as a bug hunter, but you must be a skilled, ethical hacker.

8. How much can a bug bounty hunter make in the first year?

Bug bounty programs can pay rewards from $30 to $30,000, depending on your skills and experience.