Hunt Core

Hunt: Core

The discipline every hunt-* skill assumes. Class-specific technique lives in the hunt skills and the wiki; this file holds what is true regardless of which bug class you are chasing.

Owned here, never repeated in a hunt skill: the scope gate, two-account setup, confirmation gate, enumeration limits, stop conditions, marker discipline, wiki query/self-heal protocol, FIND output, Deadends, and distillation. A hunt skill that restates any of these will drift from this one; reference it instead.

Scope gate

Hunting means reading other people's data, escalating privileges, and creating accounts. Outside an authorized engagement all of it is a crime. Before any request leaves the machine:

1. Authorization - a program with the target in scope, a signed agreement, your own lab, or a CTF. "Probably fine" is not authorization.
2. Scope - exact hosts. *.target.com does not cover targetapp.io, an acquisition, or target.com.cdn.net. Read targets/<eng>/scope.md.
3. Exclusions and forbidden techniques - check no_bruteforce, scanning caps, DoS, social engineering, and any per-program rule before the technique that would violate it.
4. Two accounts, both yours - see below. Required for any authorization-class bug.
5. Deadends - read targets/<eng>/Deadends.md and skip what is already exhausted.

Unconfirmed on any of these: ask. Do not infer scope from the fact that a host resolved. Discovery is not authorization. The scope-guard hook enforces the host check on Bash commands; it is a backstop, not the gate.

Two-account rule

Authorization findings are "account A reached account B's object." Without B you have two bad options: test against a real user, or report a guess. Both are worse than not reporting.

• User A - resource owner. User B - attacker. Separate browser profiles so cookies never cross.
• Record both internal IDs in targets/<eng>/identities.md as you discover them.
• Cross-tenant work needs two tenants, not two users in one. Many apps isolate tenants correctly and users not at all.

Confirmation gate

Nothing becomes a FIND on the strength of a response body. The gate is per class; the hunt skill owns the specific "NOT confirmation / IS confirmation" list. Universal rules:

1. Re-verify in a clean session. Fresh token, new profile, no cached state. If the effect vanishes, you changed your own screen.
2. Exercise the capability. Not "the server accepted it" but perform the action only the new state permits.
3. Rule out legitimate access. Before claiming cross-account access, confirm A is not supposed to see it: shared teams, sharing links, public objects, org-wide visibility. The most common false positive in authorization testing.
4. Blind classes need an OOB HIT. No inference-only findings. The oob.md row must flip to HIT before a FIND is scaffolded.
5. Reproduce from scratch against your own written steps.

Failed 1-3 is a Deadend, not a "probably real but hard to prove."

[[wiki/techniques/methodology/safe-probing-and-controls]] carries the other half of this gate: how to probe destructive or sensitive surface without touching a real record (use an identifier proven not to exist), and how to fire a control so a NEGATIVE result means something instead of being assumed.

When the hunt spans many hosts, sessions, or parallel agents, the coordination layer adds failure modes this gate does not cover: claims nobody re-checked, requests nobody counted, the same finding filed twice, and severity drifting upward as work is summarised. See [[wiki/techniques/methodology/multi-agent-campaign-orchestration]].

Enumeration limits

Prove the boundary is missing, not how much is behind it.

The server does not check any object. Demonstrating that takes two or three identifiers. A thousand-ID sweep does not raise severity; it collects real users' data and converts a critical finding into an incident report naming you.

• Default: 5 identifiers. Enough to show a sequential pattern and a missing check.
• Ceiling without explicit operator approval: 20.
• Beyond that, and for any range sweep: stop and ask. State why the extra volume changes the finding. Usually it does not.
• no_bruteforce in scope means range 0. No sweep, no ffuf over an ID list, no exception.
• Never enumerate writes. Read at volume is a rate problem; write at volume is destruction.

For scale evidence, cite a total field, a pagination header, or a result count. "The response reports 41,180 records; none beyond my two test accounts were retrieved" proves scale without retrieving anything.

Scope of these limits. They govern OBJECT and RECORD enumeration (guessing identifiers to pull other users' data). They do NOT cap legitimate service discovery: an SSRF internal port sweep or a network map is bounded by the engagement RoE (no_dos, scan-rate caps), not by the 5-to-20 object ceiling. Thread it and honor the cap; do not clamp a port sweep to 20.

Stop conditions

Stop and report rather than continuing when:

• You received real user data. An ID you guessed belonged to someone real, a cache served another session, a beacon fired in a live employee context. Do not re-request to confirm, do not save it, do not use anything in it. Report immediately, state what you received and that you destroyed it, and note it in the FIND rather than hiding it.
• The next step is destructive or persistent - deleting objects, modifying another tenant's config, planting content that outlives the session.
• You have a traffic-affecting primitive - desync, cache poisoning, connection-pool effects. The mechanism is the finding.
• The last step needs volume beyond the limits above.
• You already have the severity ceiling. More escalation, more risk, no more payout.
• You left scope. Even one hop. Especially one hop.

Stopping is not failure. "Confirmed and did not exploit" is worth more than a forfeited payout.

Wrong-vector tells (switch the vector, do not tune the tooling). A vector is exhausted the moment it starts fighting you; grinding harder is the sunk-cost trap. Two mechanical signals mean the current vector is the wrong door, not that your tooling needs another pass:

• The target starves under your own exploit loop (repeated 000 / connection-timeout / empty-reply while you hammer one endpoint). A vector that DoSes a lab box is almost never the intended one. Stop, let it drain, and enumerate a DIFFERENT class (source-read: LFI / alias-traversal / .git / backup; a second service or vhost's own app; OOB creds) before returning.
• Two verified hashes in a row fail the primary wordlist. The passwords are not wordlist material - they are delivered out-of-band (an email/note/KeePass, a config, a second service). Stop cracking and re-enumerate for where the creds are HANDED OUT; do not extract a third hash. (Engineering around a hostile channel - per-char verify-fix, min-of-2 sampling, gentler pacing - is the tell you are on the wrong vector, not a reason to keep going.)

When a wrong-vector tell fires and the next door is not obvious, call Skill(redteamlead) before grinding further - it reads the engagement state + evidence + wiki and returns ranked directions with an explicit STOP. That is exactly what it is for ("I'm stuck / which vector / should I keep hammering this"); one RTL call at the first sign a vector is fighting back beats hours of sunk-cost grind.