Real World Bug Hunting By Peter

How to Actually Use Real World Bug Hunting By Peter Without Losing Your Mind

I found this tool a while back when I was going through a phase of trying to automate my recon process. The short version is that it's a collection of bash scripts and wordlists designed to speed up the discovery phase of bug bounty hunting, especially for subdomain enumeration and basic vulnerability scanning. It's not a silver bullet. It's a starting point that most beginners end up either loving or completely discarding within a week. The way it actually works in practice is that you point it at a target domain and it fires off a series of tools in parallel. Subfinder, amass, assetfinder, httpx, nuclei — the whole stack runs through automatically. The wordlists it ships with are mostly sourced from layer1sec and other community collections, trimmed down to remove obvious junk entries. You can have it enumerate subdomains for a target in roughly 3 to 8 minutes depending on how many resolvers you feed it. A full manual recon pass with the same depth usually takes me about 45 minutes minimum when I'm being thorough. One thing I want to emphasize that most guides miss is that the tool assumes you already have some of these dependencies installed. If you're running a fresh Kali install, you're going to spend more time wrestling with missing packages than actually finding bugs. The biggest friction point for newcomers is the resolver list. The default config uses public resolvers which are unreliable. I always swap in a custom list of at least 200 working DNS resolvers before running anything. Without that, your subdomain results will have a false positive rate hovering around 30 to 40 percent on larger domains. I keep a running pool in a text file and point the script at it using the -r flag. That alone drops my noise significantly.

Here's a scenario I ran into recently that isn't covered in any of the documentation. I was running it against a target that used Cloudflare's wildcard DNS along with a few CNAME-based subdomains hosted on a separate CDN provider. The initial scan returned about 1,200 subdomains but maybe 400 of them were real. The issue was that Cloudflare's response codes confused the HTTP status filtering in the default config — it was marking some 403s as valid because the response headers contained partial Cloudflare pages. I ended up writing a quick post-processing filter that checks for the presence of Cloudflare-specific headers like cf-ray and filters out pure CDN edge responses. The script itself doesn't do this, and it took me probably two hours to get the filter working correctly, but after that it's been saving me about 30 minutes per engagement on Cloudflare-heavy targets. Another counter-intuitive thing about this tool: running nuclei with the default templates alongside it actually slows things down more than helps. The nuclei scan it triggers out of the box uses every template it can find. On a large target, that means scanning thousands of endpoints with hundreds of templates each. It usually adds an extra 20 to 40 minutes to the total run time and generates a lot of low-severity noise. I recommend running a targeted nuclei scan with only the critical and high severity templates (-t cves/ -t exposures/) after the initial enumeration phase, rather than letting it run everything at once. This cuts the scanning portion from roughly 35 minutes down to about 8 minutes on most targets. There are real limitations here. The tool struggles with targets that use aggressive rate limiting or WAFs. I've seen it get IPs blocked on HackerOne engagements after running the default settings for more than a couple minutes. You need to add the --rate-limit and --concurrency flags and throttle it down to about 50 concurrent requests. That trades speed for sustainability and it's worth the trade-off. Also, the wordlists included are decent but they haven't been updated in a while. I supplement the default directories and paths lists with the latest ones from SecLists — the tool doesn't do this automatically and you'll miss a lot of non-standard endpoints if you rely solely on what's bundled.

If you're just starting out with bug hunting, I'd suggest downloading the repository and running it against your own test targets first. Read through the script files to understand what each step does. The tool is transparent enough that you can see exactly what commands are being executed, which is actually one of its best features for learning. Set up your environment, add your resolver list, lower the concurrency, and run it against a target you know well. When you get results back, manually verify at least 20 percent of the subdomains to understand what kind of accuracy you're working with. Then adjust from there. The download is available on the creator's GitHub repository. You'll want the latest release branch since there have been several commits fixing issues with httpx compatibility over the past few months. Clone it, read the README for the dependency checklist, and don't skip setting up your own resolver pool. That single change will make more difference than any configuration tweak you make after it.