And… they're right.

But sometimes, life blesses you with a vulnerability so obvious that you'll question every hour you ever spent learning SSRF payloads.

This is one of those stories.

I Started With Methodology (Because I Pretend To Be Professional)

Like every "serious" pentester, I follow the standard methodology:

Recon → Mapping → Enumeration → Testing → Reporting → Existential Crisis

But today we are not going to romanticize methodology. We're skipping straight to recon — because that's where the magic (and money) happened.

The Tool? A Simple Regex + Wayback Machine

No fancy AI.

No hyper-automated scanner.

Just the humble Wayback Machine to scrape archived URLs:

I fetched historical URLs for the target like:

https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=*.example.com/*&collapse=urlkey&output=text&fl=original

Yes. That's it.

Sometimes success looks less like elite hacking and more like "I pasted a URL and prayed."

And Then… Jackpot

Among the hundreds of dusty old URLs, guess what I found?

Payment-related endpoints.

Invoices.

Receipts.

Actual user payment data paths archived in plain sight.

And before you ask — yes, I opened them in Incognito Mode. Because if you don't do that, caching issues can make it look like the links belong only to you — and then the triager says:

"This appears to be Informational."

And you say:

"This appears to be pain."

But in Incognito?

Boom. Real exposed invoices. Publicly accessible.

Information Disclosure. Clean. Valid. Impactful.

Reported. Triaged. $100. Done.

No exploitation.

No RCE.

No hacking Hollywood soundtrack in the background.

Just recon.

And within a short time…

Approved. Valid. Severity acknowledged. $100 bounty.

The Moral of the Story

Before chasing exotic vulnerabilities…

Do recon.

Then do more recon.

Then when you think you've done enough recon?

Yeah — do recon again.

Because archived URLs sometimes expose more truth than production systems ever will.