GitHub Recon: The Underrated Technique to Discover High-Impact Leaks in Bug Bounty
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Summary
A fundamental part of a successful bug bounty program is reconnaissance and a powerful, underutilised source for this is GitHub, according to this Splunk contributor.
They said developers usually post sensitive data, such as secrets, tokens, and credentials, without realising it, which gives ethical hackers significant opportunities to find valuable information.
The article lays out manual and automated methods for extracting data from GitHub, using filters, dorks, and other tools to perform effective reconnaissance using only open-source intelligence.
To start the search, type the target domain name with a sensitive keyword into the GitHub search bar.
For example, “Example.com” and “password” will return all publicly listed repositories and files that contain the word “password” linked to the “example.com” domain.
This is just a starting point and will give a quick overview of what sensitive data has been committed and where. Further exploration will require more in-depth analysis and different search techniques.