This course features Coursera Coach!
A smarter way to learn with interactive, real-time conversations that help you test your knowledge, challenge assumptions, and deepen your understanding as you progress through the course. Expand your offensive security expertise by mastering reconnaissance, API security testing, and responsible vulnerability discovery. Through practical demonstrations and hands-on labs, you'll learn how security professionals identify attack surfaces, assess modern APIs, document security findings, and participate in ethical bug bounty programs while following responsible disclosure practices. The course begins with information gathering techniques, including Whois lookups, DNS enumeration, site reporting, and firewall analysis to build a comprehensive understanding of target environments. You'll then dive into API penetration testing by configuring test environments, using Burp Suite and Postman, and evaluating common API security risks such as Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA), broken authentication, excessive data exposure, mass assignment, CORS misconfigurations, SQL injection, and improper asset management. The final section focuses on applying these skills in realistic scenarios. You'll learn professional penetration test reporting, explore legitimate cybersecurity career paths, and observe live bug bounty methodologies involving reconnaissance, JavaScript analysis, open redirect testing, XSS, broken access control, IDOR, authentication reviews, and responsible vulnerability reporting. Throughout the course, emphasis is placed on ethical testing within authorized environments and industry best practices. This course is ideal for aspiring penetration testers, bug bounty hunters, cybersecurity analysts, and security professionals with prior knowledge of web application security and networking. Familiarity with HTTP, APIs, Linux, and foundational penetration testing concepts is recommended. The course is designed at an Advanced difficulty level. By the end of the course, you will be able to perform structured reconnaissance, assess API security using professional tools, identify and validate common API and web vulnerabilities, prepare professional penetration testing reports, and apply ethical bug bounty methodologies within authorized security testing environments.
