Critical Thinking - Bug Bounty Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Episode 135: Akamai's Ryan Barnett on WAFs, Unicode Confusables, and Triage Stories Aug 14, 2025

Show notes

Episode 135: In this episode of Critical Thinking - Bug Bounty Podcast Justin sits down with Ryan Barnett for a deep dive on WAFs. We also recap his Exploiting Unicode Normalization talk from DEFCON, and get his perspective on bug hunting from his time at Akamai.

Got any ideas and suggestions? Feel free to send us any feedback here: info@criticalthinkingpodcast.io

Shoutout to YTCracker for the awesome intro music!

====== Links ======

Follow your hosts Rhynorater and Rez0 on Twitter:

https://x.com/Rhynorater

https://x.com/rez0__

====== Ways to Support CTBBPodcast ======

Hop on the CTBB Discord at https://ctbb.show/discord!

We also do Discord subs at $25, $10, and $5 - premium subscribers get access to private masterclasses, exploits, tools, scripts, un-redacted bug reports, etc.

You can also find some hacker swag at https://ctbb.show/merch!

Today’s Sponsor - ThreatLocker. Checkout ThreatLocker Detect! https://www.criticalthinkingpodcast.io/tl-detect

Today’s Guest: https://x.com/ryancbarnett

====== Resources ======

Accidental Stored XSS Flaw in Zemanta 'Related Posts' Plugin for TypePad

https://webappdefender.blogspot.com/2013/04/accidental-stored-xss-flaw-in-zemanta.html

XSS Street-Fight

https://media.blackhat.com/bh-dc-11/Barnett/BlackHat_DC_2011_Barnett_XSS%20Streetfight-Slides.pdf

Blackhat USA 2025 - Lost in Translation: Exploiting Unicode Normalization

https://www.blackhat.com/us-25/briefings/schedule/#lost-in-translation-exploiting-unicode-normalization-44923

====== Timestamps ======

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:02:49) Accidental Stored XSS in Typepad Plugin

(00:06:34) Chatscatter & Abusing third party Analytics

(00:11:42) Ryan Barnett Introduction

(00:21:11) Virtual Patching & WAF Challenges

(00:40:39) AWS API Gateways & Whitelisting Bug Hunter Traffic

(00:49:59) Lost in Translation: Exploiting Unicode Normalization

(01:11:29) CSPs at the WAF level & 'Bounties for Bypass'

Episode 134: XBOW - AI Hacking Agent and Human in the Loop with Diego Djurado Aug 04, 2025

Show notes

Episode 134: In this episode of Critical Thinking - Bug Bounty Podcast we’re joined by Diego Djurado to give us the scoop on XBOW. We cover a little about its architecture and approach to hunting, the challenges with hallucinations, and the future of AI in the BB landscape. Diego also shares some of his own hacking journey and successes in the Ambassador World cup.

Got any ideas and suggestions? Feel free to send us any feedback here: info@criticalthinkingpodcast.io

Shoutout to YTCracker for the awesome intro music!

====== Links ======

Follow your hosts Rhynorater and Rez0 on Twitter:

https://x.com/Rhynorater

https://x.com/rez0__

====== Ways to Support CTBBPodcast ======

Hop on the CTBB Discord at https://ctbb.show/discord!

We also do Discord subs at $25, $10, and $5 - premium subscribers get access to private masterclasses, exploits, tools, scripts, un-redacted bug reports, etc.

You can also find some hacker swag at https://ctbb.show/merch!

Today’s Sponsor - ThreatLocker User Store

Today’s Guest: https://x.com/djurado9

====== This Week in Bug Bounty ======

Announcement of our upcoming live hacking event at Nullcon Berlin, taking place on September 4-5

Bug Bounty Village Speakers 2025

Talkie Pwnii Caido showcase

Caido Masterclass – From Setup to Exploits

Access Control vs Account Takeover: What Bug Bounty Hunters Need to Know

====== Resources ======

CVE-2025-49493: XML External Entity (XXE) Injection in Akamai CloudTest

====== Timestamps ======

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:05:56) Diego's ATO Bug

(00:12:01) H1 Ambassador World Cup and work with XBOW

(00:20:57) XBOW's CloudTest XXE Bug

(00:49:59) Freedom, Hallucinations, & Validation

(01:07:24) XBOW's Architecture

(01:23:50) Humans in the Loop, Harnesses, and Xbow's Reception

(01:44:21) Ambassador World Cup plans for the future

Episode 133: Building Hacker Communities - Bug Bounty Village, getDisclosed, and the LHE Squad Jul 31, 2025

Show notes

Episode 133: In this episode of Critical Thinking - Bug Bounty Podcast we’re joined by Harley and Ari from H1 to talk some about community management roles within Bug Bounty, as well as discuss the evolution of Bug Bounty Village at DEFCON, and what they’ve got in store this year.

Got any ideas and suggestions? Feel free to send us any feedback here: info@criticalthinkingpodcast.io

Shoutout to YTCracker for the awesome intro music!

====== Links ======

Follow your hosts Rhynorater and Rez0 on Twitter:

https://x.com/Rhynorater

https://x.com/rez0__

====== Ways to Support CTBBPodcast ======

Hop on the CTBB Discord at https://ctbb.show/discord!

We also do Discord subs at $25, $10, and $5 - premium subscribers get access to private masterclasses, exploits, tools, scripts, un-redacted bug reports, etc.

You can also find some hacker swag at https://ctbb.show/merch!

Today’s Guests:

Today’s Sponsor is Adobe. Use code CTBBP0907 in your first report on Adobe Behance, Portfolio, Fonts or Acrobat Web, and earn a one-time 10% bonus reward!

====== This Week in Bug Bounty ======

BBV Platform Panel about Triage

YesWeHACK Makes Debut at Black Hat USA 2025

New Dojo challenge featuring a time-based token prediction combined PyYAML deserialization

GMSGadget

====== Resources ======

Bug Bounty Village

Disclosed Online

Harley's Youtube Channel

====== Timestamps ======

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:05:51) Bug Stories and Hacking Journeys

(00:32:37) Community Management within Bug Bounty

(00:39:43) Bug Bounty Village - Origin & 2025 Plans

(01:02:39) Disclosed Online and Harley's Upcoming Ebook

Episode 132: Archive Testing Methodology with Mathias Karlsson Jul 24, 2025

Show notes

Episode 132: In this episode of Critical Thinking - Bug Bounty Podcast, Justin Gardner is joined by Mathias Karlsson to discuss vulnerabilities associated with archives. They talk about his new tool, Archive Alchemist, and explore topics like the significance of Unicode paths, symlinks, and TAR before they end up talking about Charsets again..

Got any ideas and suggestions? Feel free to send us any feedback here: info@criticalthinkingpodcast.io

Shoutout to YTCracker for the awesome intro music!

====== Links ======

Follow your hosts Rhynorater and Rez0 on Twitter:

====== Ways to Support CTBBPodcast ======

Hop on the CTBB Discord!

You can also find some hacker swag at https://ctbb.show/merch!

Today's Sponsor: ThreatLocker - Patch Management

Today’s Guest: Mathias Karlsson

====== This Week in Bug Bounty ======

Swiss Post's 2025 Public Intrusion Test starts on July 28

Intigriti teams with NVIDIA

Bugcrowd Ingenuity Awards

Hack the Hacker Series - AI Vulnerabilities and Bug Bounties

A Novel Technique for SQL Injection in PDO’s Prepared Statements

How We Accidentally Discovered a Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in ETQ Reliance

====== Resources ======

Archive Alchemist

Hacking Livestream #53: The ZIP file format

====== Timestamps ======

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:10:04) Archive Alchemist

(00:36:05) Unicode Extensions, normalization, and confusion attacks on Zip parsers

(00:48:44) Character Sets

(01:01:49) 7zip & File Names

(01:06:44) Path Traversal, Symlinks & Identifying Techniques

(01:36:05) Hardlinks and TAR

Episode 131: SL Cyber Writeups, Bug Bounty Metastrategy, and Orphaned Github Commits Jul 17, 2025

Show notes

Episode 131: In this episode of Critical Thinking - Bug Bounty Podcast we're covering Christmas in July with several banger articles from Searchlight Cyber, as well as covering things like Raycast for Windows, Third-Person prompting, and touch on the recent McDonalds Leak

Got any ideas and suggestions? Feel free to send us any feedback here: info@criticalthinkingpodcast.io

Shoutout to YTCracker for the awesome intro music!

====== Links ======

Follow your hosts Rhynorater and Rez0 on Twitter:

https://x.com/Rhynorater

https://x.com/rez0__

====== Ways to Support CTBBPodcast ======

Hop on the CTBB Discord at https://ctbb.show/discord!

We also do Discord subs at $25, $10, and $5 - premium subscribers get access to private masterclasses, exploits, tools, scripts, un-redacted bug reports, etc.

You can also find some hacker swag at https://ctbb.show/merch!

Today’s Sponsor is Adobe. Use code CTBBP0907 in your first report on Adobe Behance, Portfolio, Fonts or Acrobat Web, and earn a one-time 10% bonus reward!

====== Resources ======

v1 Instance Metadata Service protections bypass

Would you like an IDOR with that? Leaking 64 million McDonald’s job applications

How we got persistent XSS on every AEM cloud site, thrice

Google docs now supports export as markdown

Abusing Windows, .NET quirks, and Unicode Normalization to exploit DNN (DotNetNuke)

How I Scanned all of GitHub’s “Oops Commits” for Leaked Secrets

Bug bounty, feedback, strategy and alchemy

====== Timestamps ======

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:05:39) Metadata Service protections bypass & Mcdonalds Leak

(00:12:30) Christmas in July with Searchlight Cyber Pt 1

(00:19:43) Export as Markdown, Raycast for Windows, & Third-Person prompting

(00:23:56) Christmas in July with Searchlight Cyber Pt 2

(00:27:39) GitHub’s “Oops Commits” for Leaked Secrets

(00:36:53) Bug bounty, feedback, strategy and alchemy

Episode 130: Minecraft Hacks to Google Hacking Star - Valentino Jul 10, 2025

Show notes

Episode 130: In this episode of Critical Thinking - Bug Bounty Podcast Justin is joined by Valentino, who shares his journey from hacking Minecraft to becoming a Google hunter. He talks us through several bugs, including an HTML Sanitizer bypass and .NET deserialization, and highlights the hyper creative approaches he tends to employ.

Got any ideas and suggestions? Feel free to send us any feedback here: info@criticalthinkingpodcast.io

Shoutout to YTCracker for the awesome intro music!

====== Links ======

Follow your hosts Rhynorater and Rez0 on Twitter:

https://x.com/Rhynorater

https://x.com/rez0__

====== Ways to Support CTBBPodcast ======

Hop on the CTBB Discord at https://ctbb.show/discord!

We also do Discord subs at $25, $10, and $5 - premium subscribers get access to private masterclasses, exploits, tools, scripts, un-redacted bug reports, etc.

You can also find some hacker swag at https://ctbb.show/merch!

Today's Sponsor: ThreatLocker - Patch Management

https://www.criticalthinkingpodcast.io/TL-patch-management

Today’s Guest: Valentino - https://blog.3133700.xyz/

====== Resources ======

JMX Manager

Stored XSS in reclamos

Command Injection in Vertex AI

whitepaper-net-deser.pdf

free-after-use.go

A Journey Into Finding Vulnerabilities in the PMB Library Management System

emulated-register_globals.php

====== Timestamps ======

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:02:38) JMXProxy Bug Story

(00:09:46) Intro to Valentino

(00:29:08) HTML Sanitizer bypass on MercadoLibre

(00:37:16) Command injection in Vertex AI

(00:44:10) .NET deserialization, & Argument injection to LFR, & Free after use

(00:51:33) Luck, creativity, and evolution as Hacker

(00:59:31) Issues in file extension validation components, Emulated register_globals, & AI Hacking

Episode 129: Is this how Bug Bounty Ends? Jul 03, 2025

Show notes

Episode 129: In this episode of Critical Thinking - Bug Bounty Podcast we chat about the future of hack bots and human-AI collaboration, the challenges posed by tokenization, and the need for cybersecurity professionals to adapt to the evolving landscape of hacking in the age of AI

Got any ideas and suggestions? Feel free to send us any feedback here: info@criticalthinkingpodcast.io

Shoutout to YTCracker for the awesome intro music!

====== Links ======

Follow your hosts Rhynorater and Rez0 on Twitter:

https://x.com/Rhynorater

https://x.com/rez0__

====== Ways to Support CTBBPodcast ======

Hop on the CTBB Discord at https://ctbb.show/discord!

We also do Discord subs at $25, $10, and $5 - premium subscribers get access to private masterclasses, exploits, tools, scripts, un-redacted bug reports, etc.

You can also find some hacker swag at https://ctbb.show/merch!

====== This Week in Bug Bounty ======

Improper error handling in async cryptographic operations crashes process

https://hackerone.com/reports/2817648

Recon Series #6: Excavating hidden artifacts with Wayback Machine

https://www.yeswehack.com/learn-bug-bounty/recon-wayback-machine-web-archive

====== Resources ======

This is How They Tell Me Bug Bounty Ends

https://josephthacker.com/hacking/2025/06/09/this-is-how-they-tell-me-bug-bounty-ends.html

Welcome, Hackbots: How AI Is Shaping the Future of Vulnerability Discovery

https://www.hackerone.com/blog/welcome-hackbots-how-ai-shaping-future-vulnerability-discovery

Glitch Token

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO2X3oZEJOA

Conducting smarter intelligences than me: new orchestras

https://southbridge-research.notion.site/conducting-smarter-intelligences-than-me

====== Timestamps ======

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:04:05) Is this how Bug Bounty Ends?

(00:11:14) Hackbots and handling leads

(00:20:50) Hacker chain of thought & Tokenization

(00:32:54) Context Engineering

Episode 128: New Research in Blind SSRF and Self-XSS, and How to Architect Source-code Review AI Bots Jun 26, 2025

Show notes

Episode 128: In this episode of Critical Thinking - Bug Bounty Podcast we talking Blind SSRF and Self-XSS, as well as Reversing massive minified JS with AI and a wild Google Logo Ligature Bug

Got any ideas and suggestions? Feel free to send us any feedback here: info@criticalthinkingpodcast.io

Shoutout to YTCracker for the awesome intro music!

====== Links ======

Follow your hosts Rhynorater and Rez0 on Twitter:

https://x.com/Rhynorater

https://x.com/rez0__

====== Ways to Support CTBBPodcast ======

Hop on the CTBB Discord at https://ctbb.show/discord!

We also do Discord subs at $25, $10, and $5 - premium subscribers get access to private masterclasses, exploits, tools, scripts, un-redacted bug reports, etc.

You can also find some hacker swag at https://ctbb.show/merch!

Today's Sponsor: ThreatLocker - Patch Management

====== This Week in Bug Bounty ======

BitK's "Payload plz" challenge at LeHack

====== Resources ======

Make Self-XSS Great Again

Novel SSRF Technique Involving HTTP Redirect Loops

Surf - Escalate your SSRF vulnerabilities on Modern Cloud Environments

Gecko: Intent to prototype: Framebusting Intervention

Conducting smarter intelligences than me: new orchestras

Mandark

Lumentis

jscollab

Google Logo Ligature Bug

====== Timestamps ======

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:03:55) Self-XSS and credentialless iframe

(00:16:50) Novel SSRF Technique Involving HTTP Redirect Loops

(00:25:02) Framebusting

(00:29:13) Reversing massive minified JS with AI

(00:53:12) Google Logo Ligature Bug

Episode 127: Drama, PDF as JS Chaos, Bounty Profile Apps, And More Jun 19, 2025

Show notes

Episode 127: In this episode of Critical Thinking - Bug Bounty Podcast we address some recent bug bounty controversy before jumping into a slew of news items

Shoutout to YTCracker for the awesome intro music!

Today's Sponsor: Adobe

====== This Week In Bug Bounty ======

Hackers Guide to Google dorking

YesWeCaido

New Dojo Challenge

Smart Contract BB tips

Red Team AAS

====== Resources ======

Disclosed

PDF csp bypass

Bypassing File Upload Restrictions To Exploit Client-Side Path Traversal

OBS WebSocket to RCE

Time in a bottle (or knapsack)

How to Differentiate Yourself as a Bug Bounty Hunter

Disclosed. Online

hacked-in

‘EchoLeak’

Piloting Edge Copilot

Newtowner

Tips for agent prompting

Firefox XSS vectors

Tweet from Masato Kinugawa

Chrome debug() function

Episode 126: Hacking AI Series: Vulnus ex Machina - Part 3 Jun 12, 2025

Show notes

Episode126: In this episode of Critical Thinking - Bug Bounty Podcast we wrap up Rez0’s AI miniseries ‘Vulnus Ex Machina’. Part 3 includes a showcase of AI Vulns that Rez0 himself has found, and how much they paid out.

Got any ideas and suggestions? Feel free to send us any feedback here: info@criticalthinkingpodcast.io

Shoutout to YTCracker for the awesome intro music!

====== Links ======

Follow your hosts Rhynorater and Rez0 on Twitter:

https://x.com/Rhynorater

https://x.com/rez0__

====== Ways to Support CTBBPodcast ======

Hop on the CTBB Discord at https://ctbb.show/discord!

We also do Discord subs at $25, $10, and $5 - premium subscribers get access to private masterclasses, exploits, tools, scripts, un-redacted bug reports, etc.

You can also find some hacker swag at https://ctbb.show/merch!

Today’s Sponsor - ThreatLocker Web Control

https://www.criticalthinkingpodcast.io/tl-webcontrol

====== Resources ======

Claude Code System Prompt

Attacking AI Agents

Probability of Hacks

New Gemini for Workspace Vulnerability Enabling Phishing & Content Manipulation

How to Hack AI Agents and Applications

====== Timestamps ======

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:02:53) NahamCon Recap, Claude news, and wunderwuzzi writeups