Hello and welcome to the Friday, October 31st, 2025 edition of the Sands and

at Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich, recording today from Jacksonville, Florida.

And this episode is brought to you by the Sands.edu, credit certificate program in cybersecurity leadership.

This week, I noticed some new HTTP request headers in our Honeypot logs,

and these HTTP request headers are related to Buck Bounty programs.

There is an X-request purpose header.

The value is just research for this header,

and then also specific headers for specific bug bounty programs

like Hacker 1 and Buck Crowd.

There are a couple of bug bounties that I was able to find that actually ask researchers to use these specific headers.

As always, when you're talking request headers like this, nothing is guaranteed.

It's very easy for someone, of course, to impersonate a researcher using those headers.

And then, of course, there is no guarantee that researchers will

actually use these headers as they're conducting scans for their buck bounty research.

I assume that companies participating in these buck bounty programs try to use these headers

to maybe figure out how many of the requests that they're seeing are related to bug bounties,

and at least to be able to notify researchers that are well-behaved,

that are actually using the correct headers in case something is going wrong here,

in case they like a denial of service or something like this,

so they can reach out to the researcher and ask them maybe to

stop their scans or throttle them as necessary. If you're in curiosity here, I think the value of

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