I ended up building a tool that helped me build another one of my tools. This was never my intention from the start, but it ended up working so perfectly! This is why I’m in love with programming…
While building this new tool/platform of mine: BotSentinel.
Some context: I’ve been building Telegram bots for about 2 years now. I built them with good old Python. Telegram bots are very useful; you write them, plop them in your desired Telegram channel or group, and watch them do their thing. The bot will always be running (well, that’s the hope at least), and it “awaits” a command or maybe a specific message that calls it to life. That’s great & all, but it usually listens all the time. Meaning, when I accidentally entered something I didn’t mean to, or inserted a script (for testing of my own bots), it would inappropriately respond when it didn’t need to. Yup, that sounds like garbage programming, right? Well, yeah, but regardless of such, it’s still concerning to see it reflect an insecure message or parse dangerous data that it may accidentally pick up. Therefore, to circumvent this dilemma, I created BotSentinel.
While building BotSentinel, I needed a way for the tool to securely & accurately scan & test a bot with the most common & uncommon types of payloads. Except, I wasn’t trying to rewrite an entire separate API/function to do what I essentially already made. Remembering that I already made a tool that does the very thing I was dreading to build (PayloadGo: Written in Golang… (yup, captain obvious over here)), I simply added it into my environment (same language; less hassle, gotta love it), and off we were.
Upon testing it on my own bots, it worked beautifully… (after 3 hours of debug & self-induced existential crisis, naturally).
From there, I truly realized the beauty & power of knowing how to program while building my Cybersecurity tools.
Automating the tedious portions of my bug bounties with custom-made tools has been the revelation I never knew I needed until a few months ago.
After all the hard work, late nights, and river of tears caused by the lovely Go Runtime & Compiler, I’m happy to announce botsentinel.cysectools.com is on its way to being fully complete & a true helping companion for Telegram bot devs like myself.
Thank you for reading. I’m open to comments, questions, feedback, and possibly free therapy for terminal-error-based PTSD.
