Hands-On Bug Hunting for Penetration Testers

Emails

Emails are an item of information many people try to deny to bots and automated agents crawling their site. One typical strategy is encoding email links as HTML entities to make them harder to collect. That means you can hide an email such as [e-mail] as the following entity code:

[e-mail]

Unless the crawler is expecting to detect and decode entities as part of its scraping process, this little obfuscation trick can be surprisingly effective.

But if an email is exposed on a company site, it's usually meant to be a public-facing handle. Submitting a bug report about [e-mail] or even because you've deduced the employee email naming convention is something like [e-mail] ...