Information Disclosure — My First Finding on Hackerone!

mehedishakeel
3 min readOct 21, 2022

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Information Disclosure is a kind of bug that is not so hard to find but could make huge impact on target. Some time you can get very sensitive information with less effort. That’s how i got my first report resolved on hackerone.

Now let’s discuss how i get my first bug and what are the tools and technique i use,

On that target program scope i only had one domain and it was a private program. So i am not authorized to include the real domain and company name into this write up. so lets take the example domain as

https://mehedishakeel.com

I start visiting the website in my Firefox browser. There is a famous add-on name Wappalyzer. So after visiting couple of pages, i clicked on wappalyzer and it shows me that target website using WordPress & Wp-Engine.

Wappalyzer Info

After getting that, before running wpscan, i think of visiting a common juicy file name “robots.txt”. Unfortunately, i didn’t get anything special on that file.

Remember, always visit all the URL which is disallowed on /robots.txt file.

https://mehedishakeel.com/robots.txt

After, not getting any valuable directory and files listing on “robots.txt” file. I thought to look for sensitive directory and file, so i fire up a tool name dirsearch which is a very useful tool to find directory and sensitive files faster then dirb.

dirsearch -u https://mehedishakeel.com

and there i find a file directory name “_wpeprivate/config.json”. This is one of the goldmine of those WordPress website which are using wpengine.

dirsearch output

I open this url with the target domain , and i just got entire database username, password.

https://mehedishakeel.com/_wpeprivate/config.json

“_wpeprivate/config.json” revealed API key of WPEngine, DB username, DB password and so on in plain text. That’s how i got my first resolved bug on hackerone.

So whenever you got a target with WordPress and WPengine, always look for _wpeprivate/config.json” file.

Thank you for reading!

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