Thread about my life journey since my first bounty exactly 6 years ago.
6 years ago, I have earned my first bounty. $500

I already had my hands on hacking and had knowndlege about what I was doing. I used to pass 15-17 hous per day on screen. I didn't do this mainly because I wanted to earn money, but because I loved hacking. I had this inspiration of learning exploits, learning vulnerabilities.

Meanwhile, I used to hack mainly on HackerOne and Bugcrowd. Nothing has changed in this. I love how both platforms handles bugs, and makes it easy to receive bounties.

Over the time I have seen people come and go. I remember back in the days we were few doing bug bounties, at least on HackerOne platform and what I could see from leaderboards. I can cite: @NahamSec @seanmeals @infosec_au @nbsriharsha @emgeekboy and many others.

Bug bounty is not as easy as people might think it is. Mentally, trust me , it's REALLY hard. Multiple months have passed where I earned $0 . Yes. Other months I could be at $5000 - $60 000 .

I have learned much from Googling whatever I wanted to learn. And I still do . I don't understand people coming for help before digging on your own. Ressources since then have increased of over 150% AT LEAST. What we used to have in the past was mostly `potential paths` to a vuln

My circle of friends have relatively decreased over the time . I have seen "friends" who are mostly jealous . Doesn't matter how good they also do in their fields, jealousy was and is present. But what can I do. We, "arabs" people, tend to get jealous but never try to do better

I've been judged as someone who is complicated to deal with. Yes, that's because I have standards. I don't waste my time in anything which doesn't give me any value. Value can be joy or money.

Here was mainly my routine over time:
Wake up
Go to School
Do my homework
Start hacking
Breaks in between to relax
Sleep
When I started earning enough money, I started traveling around.

I'm glad of coming from a country where the internet is not even a thing and stand here today with enough knowndlege to help other people. I've made many friends online and most of these friendships are worth more than any friendship I could have had in real-life.

My advices to anyone struggling/starting: Read. Ask. If you ask 10 people, you are likely going to receive answer from 1 which will lead you on a path. Learn. Be hungry. Relax. Everything is ephemeral. Don't kill yourself doing something you don't REALLY love. Life is short.

Cut yourself from toxic people. It's hard when you don't have anyone looking out for you, but you have to do it to advance. They will just bring you down at every field. They are never happy about any of your achievements. They will drag you into their shitty-thoughts.

About myself: Today I am owner of multiple local businesses. I do bug bounties for fun but as I run my own startups I can take any time I want to do my hobby. I'm 1 year away of earning a Master Degree in Business. I read books often, I write texts I only read myself.

Some months ago I have announced I was going to publish my first book , about hacking techniques I use daily and my own hack-tricks. I'm almost done writing it but I'm going to start over again.

Instead of just writing a book about technical-side of vulnerabilities and exploitation, I'm going to write a book called "In the Skin of a Hacker" where I will highlight more stories which led me to finding bugs , expanding my relationship circle and stories about myself.

I'm really grateful to be part of this awesome community. Thanks to everyone for being kind, caring, friendly and lovable.

Until then..
Have a wonderful day :)