bounty-hunting-methodology

bounty-hunting-methodology is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from PurpleAILAB/Decepticon. It costs 37 tokens per session (1,336 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A white-box method for hunting security bugs in open-source projects with advisory, bounty, or responsible-disclosure programs. White-box testing means reading the source and architecture rather than relying only on scans.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps assess a target's impact, trust boundaries, advisory history, reward program, architecture, and evidence needed for a strong report.
Why use it?
It focuses research on exploitable findings that maintainers can verify and act on.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit It helps assess a target's impact, trust boundaries, advisory history, reward program, architecture, and evidence needed for a strong report.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/purpleailab/decepticon/bounty-hunting
About the project

Decepticon is an autonomous red-team agent that coordinates AI agents, security tools, sandboxes, and supporting services for authorized cybersecurity assessments. Security researchers and red teams can run it through its Docker stack, cloud service, command-line interface, or Python SDK, with the catalogue entries representing its available skills.

PurpleAILAB/Decepticon · 5,491 stars · on GitHub · decepticon.red

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add PurpleAILAB/Decepticon --skill bounty-hunting
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PurpleAILAB/Decepticon

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for bounty-hunting-methodology

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/purpleailab/decepticon/bounty-hunting/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/purpleailab/decepticon/bounty-hunting)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/purpleailab/decepticon/bounty-hunting"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/purpleailab/decepticon/bounty-hunting/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for bounty-hunting-methodology

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/purpleailab/decepticon/bounty-hunting"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/purpleailab/decepticon/bounty-hunting.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 37 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,336 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Excessive Agency · line 133
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00037 $0.01336
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00668
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00267
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00134

Measured 9d ago against content hash fb299373e76b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

bounty-hunting-methodology scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Runs shell commandslowCapability

Expected in a hook, worth knowing in a rule or an instructions file.

- `exec()`, `eval()`, `spawn()`, `subprocess.run()`, `os.system()`
Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

packages/decepticon/decepticon/skills/standard/analyst/bounty-hunting/SKILL.md · 134 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 134 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Bug Bounty Hunting Methodology

You are not scanning. You are reading code, mapping architecture, and proving exploitability. Volume is the enemy — signal is the metric. Every report must survive triage by an experienced security engineer.

Target Assessment

Before committing iteration budget, evaluate the target:

  1. Impact surface: downloads/week, GitHub stars, dependency depth. A vuln in lodash or React Router has 10-100x the impact of a vuln in a 200-star project.
  2. Trust boundary complexity: Does the app load config from untrusted sources? Handle plugins? Parse user-controlled serialized data? Multi-tenant auth? Complex trust boundaries = more attack surface.
  3. Security advisory history: Check github.com/advisories?query=<package>. Projects that accept and credit researchers will work with you. Projects with zero advisories are either very secure or don't have a disclosure process.
  4. Reward program: HackerOne, Bugcrowd, Immunefi, GitHub Security Advisories, Google VRP. Check scope, excluded vuln classes, and reward tiers.

Record the assessment as a node:

kg_add_node("repo", "<name>", props={"stars": N, "downloads_weekly": N,
  "has_security_policy": true, "advisory_count": N, "bounty_program": "hackerone"})

White-Box Methodology

This is the core loop. Fork. Read. Trace. Prove.

Step 1 — Map the project

find /workspace/target -name 'package.json' -o -name 'pyproject.toml' \
  -o -name 'go.mod' -o -name 'Cargo.toml' -o -name 'composer.json' | head -20

Identify: language, framework, entry points, config loading, auth middleware.

Step 2 — Map trust boundaries

Where does untrusted input enter the system? Trace these sources:

  • HTTP request params, headers, body
  • Environment variables and .env files
  • Config files from current directory (.gemini/settings.json, .vscode/settings.json)
  • Plugin/extension loading paths
  • Deserialization of user-controlled data (pickle, YAML, JSON with class hints)
  • IPC channels, WebSocket messages, MCP tool inputs

Read the full file on GitHub · 134 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 134 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A fb299373e76b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

bounty-hunting-methodology is a skill published in the GitHub repository PurpleAILAB/Decepticon (5,491 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 1,336 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (runs shell commands). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.