Alex Chapman

@ajxchapman.bsky.social

Full Time #BugBounty Vulnerability Researcher https://blog.ajxchapman.com

If you run a Bug Bounty program (or platform) now might be a good time for you to publish the average time to triage for various issue severities. There are a _lot_ of disgruntled hackers out there at the moment who are waiting weeks / months for a program to even perform a first look at a report!

2026 and Bug Bounty triage is broken. This has on the horizon for years, even without LLM pressure, but it still seems to have caught _every_ major platform and large private program by surprise.

The VSCode remote editor function has really gone to crap recently. Any form of linting is just spinning server CPU at 100% and OOM killing random processes. Going to have to go back to filesystem monitoring and rsync at this rate.

When reviewing pull requests with new additions for CSPBypass.com, I often find myself questioning how useful a given entry actually is. If no websites whitelist a specific host, there is little point in adding it.

Every bug hunter / vulnerability researcher / pentester should have to write their own blind or timing based SQL injection tool. It's like a rite of passage, if you've taken the time to understand and produce your own you'll probably make it in this world, if not 😬 x.com/slonser_/sta...

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Last BSidesNYC I sat behind a guy doing the CTF with ChatGPT. Ctrl-a paste page source and a screenshot, hit enter, repeat. User totally not reading the output. LLM got the flag (flappybird-style JS challenge) after maybe ten rounds of this. Last message dude sent in the session was "We did it!".

This post on LLM use in CTFs sums up my feelings on the subject nicely. vt.social/@lina/116198... When simply directing LLMs for development / security research / CTFs it's quick, often accurate, often useful, but I don't inherently learn anything other than how to direct the LLM.

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!! (@lina@vt.social)

There's a lot of discourse on Twitter about people using LLMs to solve CTF challenges. I used to write CTF challenges in a past life, so I threw a couple of my hardest ones at it. We're screwed. At ...

vt.social

If you are selling a mirror and your ad creative includes images of the product with impossible reflections, I'm going to have to go ahead and assume your product doesn't work very well!

An in depth summary of the consequence of Google VRP increasing bounties in 2024. "We observe statistically significant increases in the reporting of high-value bugs, especially in the highest impact tiers and high merit submissions." 🔥 arxiv.org/abs/2509.16655

Incentives and Outcomes in Bug Bounties

Bug bounty programs have contributed significantly to security in technology firms in the last decade, but little is known about the role of reward incentives in producing useful outcomes. We analyze ...

arxiv.org

An in depth summary of the consequence of Google VRP increasing bounties in 2024. "We observe statistically significant increases in the reporting of high-value bugs, especially in the highest impact tiers and high merit submissions." 🔥 arxiv.org/abs/2509.16655

Incentives and Outcomes in Bug Bounties

Bug bounty programs have contributed significantly to security in technology firms in the last decade, but little is known about the role of reward incentives in producing useful outcomes. We analyze ...

arxiv.org

The new favourite fidget toy on my desk is the Zippo lighter I've had since I was a teenager. There is something about the noise of the cap flipping open and flint sparking. This has replaced the ever popular poker chips. Needless to say, I am not a great example for my kids 😬

It's been another year since my wife and I lost our first daughter Chloë. She would have been 7 today. With each passing year I can't help but think about what her life would have been like, what our life would have been like, had she been given a chance. I love her so much, but don't even know her.

There is something quite depressing about many of the advertised agentic AI use cases being posting "viral" content to social media. It stinks of one person assuming their time is inherently worth more than everyone else.

Simpsons meme "Old Man Yells At Cloud"

Can Bluesky say every word in the dictionary? I dunno but I plan to find out! I made a website that tracks every single word said on bluesky (as of yesterday).