First Year full-time and no mouse setup

Today will be quite a big post, as I want to make a bilan about my first year as a full-time hunter, sharing my figures and thoughts about it.

I also launched a new blog post about something else, so be more specific on this topic.

As a new way to procrastinate, I started looking into how I can be productive without touching a mouse anymore.

Bilan of my first year as a full-time hunter

Okay, so since September 2023, I started being a full-time hunter, just after finishing my master's degree. I just launched without really knowing where I wanted to go and how.

The previous year was my first year doing bug bounty, but part-time, and I made a post about it, I made roughly 10k during this year which was very low to start being full-time.

But my goals were to go live in southeast Asia and to live with less than 1k per month which was possible. So I took my bag and went to Bangkok, I had only around 3k of cash flow ( which was quite low, to be honest ), and my goal was to live only with bug bounty.

At this time, I only looked at some IDORs and XSS, and my bugs were medium and sometimes high, around 300 per bug. It was hard, very hard. And I didn't like living in southeast asia. For sure it was cheap, and the food was quite good, but the weather was hard for me, too hot, hard to concentrate. So I moved to Taipei, which was quite better as I had some friends there. It was better but I was poor, I ran out of my cash flow, and no bugs were paid at this time. Programs were too long to pay.

I started to stress a lot more about what to do, finding a new job, going back to France, and failing. It was quite hard at this time because it was my dream to live as a bug hunter. Was it too early? Probably. At the end of November, I finally got payments from a program, around 7k and it was much better. I decided to go to Japan for 2 weeks and then go back to France for the holiday and think about the next steps.

Back in France, I went to different places. Living with my parents, going to some European countries, to some friends, etc... But it was still hard, I wasn't confident about finding bugs and making a living with that. Until March of this year, I made roughly 1k euros per month. And it's not enough to live in France. But it was ok as I could stand and live in my parent's house at this time.

In March, there was an event in Lille called FIC. A big security ( business shit ) conference. But in there, every year, YesWeHack organizes a live event. I went there, and on the first day, I wasn't able to find anything. But I didn't give up and on the second day, I found some juicy bugs, with critical ones, making around 12k euros and being second at the event. I was shocked. That was the first time I made this amount of money. And it changed a lot of things for me, I was able to find criticals.

It's very hard to explain, but when you know that you are capable of something, you will be able to make it again. It's just mental stuff and being enough confident. Did my skills change, not a lot, but I was confident to know that I could do it.

Since that, I found more critical bugs and high, and I was able to make around 3/4k a month in bounty. I worked more as I loved it, but also I looked into more critical vulnerabilities. And I know that now I can live with that, and still find good vulns on any programs, even public ones. Just being confident about it changed a lot for me.

Now, I work on other projects, not because I don't trust bug bounty, but because it's never stable, and having other sources of income can be good.

So to summarize, since last September, I made around 40k in bounties, which is 4x what I've made the previous year. With that, I can technically live in France if I want. But you know tax comes etc, so to be safe, for the next year, I will do more.

Most of it came after March of this year. Most of them are from 2 or 3 programs.

What's next?

I plan to continue doing it. I'm going back to Asia for 3 months in Japan and South Korea, with much more money, no need to go back to a cheap guesthouse. I will work a bit there but it will also be some vacation for me.

Then, my plan is to find a flat, probably in Paris, but it will probably not be easy as being independent in France means you are nothing even if you make money.

So I will figure it out at this moment. I have other projects, like Hackyx ( that we will come back working on it in September for sure ), ReWorker, and cryptography stuff, so I have plenty of stuff to do and not only find bugs.

No mouse ?

As a new way to procrastinate, I found some videos of people developing stuff without using the mouse, only with the keyboard.

I found it fascinating and tried to give it a try. It's very fun and quite productive. The problem is it doesn't work that well for some programs. For instance, using it in Caido is not that good, look at that :

It's still possible but a pain. But I learned that it was possible. Now I use way less my mouse so it's quite better and I try to use more keyboard shortcuts to be faster.

I also fell into looking into some nice low-profile mechanical keyboards ( yes it's a way to procrastinate than looking into YouTube videos of new stuff ).

I will see in Japan if I buy a new keyboard to try. It's also fun to take a look at this stuff as in the long term, it can improve my productivity, but for now, it's quite hard to get used to it.

I will let you here for this week as it starts to be a pretty long one, see you next week for some news!