How I Made $30,000 Hacking Broken Access Control
A security researcher generated over $30,000 by chaining five distinct broken access control vulnerabilities within a single bug bounty program rather than reporting isolated low-severity issues. The methodology involved exploiting an IDOR to access patient records, manipulating search parameters to reveal cross-clinic data, and leveraging stolen user IDs to bypass Multi-Factor Authentication for full account takeover. This approach transformed multiple minor findings into a critical severity rating, demonstrating that understanding application logic and role-based permissions yields significantly higher financial returns than standard reporting tactics.
How the USN Journal Really Works
The USN journal on live Windows systems contains critical forensic data often obscured by default query parameters that return the NTFS epoch timestamp of 1-1-16-01 instead of actual file events. While standard commands like fsutil usn readdata fail to capture specific file creation or modification opcodes, using the readjournal command with CSV output and findstr filtering reveals real-time file system activity. This approach allows analysts to extract file reference numbers and update sequence numbers directly from the running system without requiring forensic imaging tools like FTK Imager or CAPE.