Standoff Bug Bounty

Positive Technologies Offers Up to 500,000 Rubles for Bypassing PT Application Firewall

Positive Technologies has expanded its Standoff Bug Bounty program to include rewards for bypassing its web application firewalls. Researchers can earn between 150,000 and 500,000 rubles for demonstrating practical bypasses against PT Application Firewall PRO and PT Application Firewall Cloud. The program targets the core protective mechanisms, including traffic filtering, attack detection rules, and the management layer used by administrators. Submissions must include reproducible attack scenarios that show how malicious requests can pass through undetected, rather than relying on scanner reports or theoretical findings. Reward amounts vary by severity and confirmed business impact, with critical issues in the PRO version paying up to 500,000 rubles. The company plans to use validated findings to strengthen detection rules and improve overall product resilience.

10 Non-Obvious S3 Integration Vulnerabilities Exposed in Web Application Bug Bounty Research

Security researcher Sergey Bobrov, known as BlackFan, published a detailed analysis of S3 misconfigurations when integrated into web applications via proxies such as nginx. The article examines ten laboratory setups demonstrating issues ranging from stored XSS and bucket takeover to rewrite rule bypasses and cache poisoning. Key findings highlight how nginx path normalization differences, missing trailing slashes, and variable usage like $uri enable attackers to reach arbitrary buckets or inject HTTP request splitting payloads. The research covers both direct S3 client usage and proxy-based integrations, emphasizing ACL and Bucket Policy errors that expose data to any authenticated S3 user worldwide. Practical demonstrations include exploitation of Ceph RGW path traversal with ../ sequences and cache key collisions via response-content-type parameters. The work provides fingerprinting tables for identifying S3-compatible systems including MinIO, Ceph RGW, and Yandex Cloud based on headers and error responses.

Starting in Bug Bounty: Understanding 1-Day Vulnerabilities

Mikhail Klyuchnikov, known in the bug hunting community as n1, shares his decade-long experience at Positive Technologies leading a team focused on software security analysis. The team specializes in discovering new zero-day vulnerabilities while also reproducing known 1-day issues to support penetration testing engagements. Klyuchnikov is also a member of the PT SWARM team, which regularly publishes technical articles, tips, and timely vulnerability breakdowns. With extensive participation in international bug bounty platforms and the Russian Standoff Bug Bounty program, he aims to explain the practical role of 1-day vulnerabilities for newcomers entering bug bounty hunting. The article provides foundational knowledge on how security researchers leverage publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in real-world testing scenarios.