I Tried 10 Recon Tools for 7 Days — Here’s What Actually Found Bugs
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Summary
Developer Abhijeet Kumawat detailed a seven-day self-imposed hacking exercise assessing ten reconnaissance tools to see whether they lived up to the hype.
He aimed to spend time on bug bounty programmes and document the tools that uncovered something meaningful.
After hours of analysing subdomains, passive results and JS files, he came across one endpoint that revealed a vulnerability that no scanner could find.
He concluded that 90% of hackers would not admit to the lack of reliability of the tools.
He outlined his challenge to establish which tools were the most useful in finding real bugs and to separate the reality from the hype.
His challenge was to use well-known and lesser-known tools and spend real time on bug bounty programmes to see which tools provided useful results.
He concluded that manual testing is necessary to achieve better results and to identify bugs that tools may miss.
He recommends hackers focus on gaining a deeper understanding of vulnerabilities rather than relying on tools.