Migrating from 42Crunch to middleBrick for Bug bounty triage assist

Your existing flow with 42Crunch likely relies on a mix of dashboards and periodic scans to surface API risks. middleBrick replaces that with a self-service scanner you can run on any public or internal API endpoint in under a minute, returning a risk score from A to F and a prioritized list of findings aligned to OWASP API Top 10 (2023).

Where 42Crunch may require project setup or agent-based instrumentation, middleBrick operates as a black-box scanner with no SDK, agent, or code access. It supports read-only methods (GET and HEAD) and text-only POST for LLM probes, making it suitable for bug bounty triage where you need fast, low-risk reconnaissance across multiple languages and frameworks.

OpenAPI specifications are parsed in full, including recursive $ref resolution, and runtime findings are cross-referenced against the spec to highlight undefined security schemes, sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination. This helps you quickly identify gaps between documented design and actual behavior without needing intrusive testing that could disrupt production environments.

During bug bounty triage, understanding how authentication and authorization are implemented is critical. middleBrick checks for multi-method bypasses, JWT misconfigurations such as alg=none or HS256 usage, expired tokens, missing claims, and sensitive data stored in claims. It also validates security headers and WWW-Authenticate compliance to reduce noise in your triage queue.

Authenticated scanning is available from the Starter tier and above, supporting Bearer, API key, Basic auth, and Cookie-based mechanisms. Domain verification is enforced through DNS TXT records or an HTTP well-known file to ensure only the domain owner can submit credentials. To avoid unnecessary load, only a curated allowlist of headers is forwarded, including Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-*.

This focused approach helps you confirm that authentication controls are present and correctly enforced before escalating findings, without triggering defensive responses that could arise from more aggressive probes.

middleBrick maps findings directly to three frameworks: PCI-DSS 4.0, SOC 2 Type II, and OWASP API Top 10 (2023). This mapping supports audit evidence collection and helps you communicate risk in terms that security reviewers and auditors recognize.

For each finding, you receive a risk score and a clear description, along with remediation guidance. Detection categories include authentication bypass, broken object level authorization (BOLA/IDOR), broken function level authorization (BFLA/privilege escalation), property over-exposure, input validation issues such as CORS wildcard usage, rate limiting anomalies, data exposure patterns like emails and Luhn-validated card numbers, and encryption misconfigurations.

LLM-specific probes are included in deeper scan tiers, covering system prompt extraction, instruction override attempts, DAN and roleplay jailbreaks, data exfiltration techniques, token smuggling, and indirect prompt injection. These are surfaced as distinct findings so you can triage AI-related risks alongside traditional API issues.

Compared to tools that require ongoing manual execution, middleBrick offers structured operational options that integrate into existing workflows. The Pro tier supports scheduled rescans every 6 hours, daily, weekly, or monthly, with diff detection that highlights new findings, resolved findings, and score drift across time.

You can configure email alerts, which are rate-limited to one per hour per API, and set up HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks that auto-disable after five consecutive failures. The platform also provides a web dashboard for tracking score trends and downloading branded compliance PDFs, while the CLI allows quick scans from the terminal with JSON or text output.

For CI/CD pipelines, the GitHub Action can gate merges when a score drops below your defined threshold, and the MCP Server enables scanning from AI coding assistants such as Claude or Cursor. These integrations reduce manual overhead while keeping your bug bounty triage aligned with development velocity.

middleBrick is a scanner designed to detect issues, not to fix, patch, block, or remediate. It does not perform active SQL injection or command injection tests, as those fall outside the read-only scope. Business logic vulnerabilities are also outside its coverage, since they require domain context that only human testers can provide.

The scanner blocks private IPs, localhost, and cloud metadata endpoints at multiple layers to prevent accidental internal probing. Customer data is deletable on demand and purged within 30 days of cancellation, and it is never sold or used for model training.

For high-stakes audits, you should still plan for a human pentester, as automated tools cannot replace deep architectural review or nuanced attack paths that depend on business-specific flows.