How I Made My First $300 Bug Bounty (Without Finding SQL Injection)

How I Made My First $300 Bug Bounty (Without Finding SQL Injection) Everyone told me my first bug bounty would take months. They were half right. It took me three weeks to submit my first report — but only because I spent the first two weeks chasing the wrong things. I was looking for SQL injection. XSS. Business logic flaws. The glamorous stuff you see in writeups that get retweeted by security Twitter. What I actually found? Missing HTTP headers. And it paid $300. The Wrong Start When I first got into bug bounties, I did what most beginners do: I watched every YouTube video, bookmarked every methodology, downloaded Burp Suite, and immediately tried to find something impressive. I'd pick a target from a VDP (Vulnerability Disclosure Program), open Burp Suite's scanner, and wait. Sometimes it flagged things. I'd dutifully try to reproduce them, write up what I found, and... realize it was a false positive. Or already known. Or out of scope. Two weeks in, I had zero submissions and a gr