March 18, 2026 · 13 minutes read A friend of mine once told me: If you ever spot an IIS blue screen, don’t stop there; there must be something. Yep, he was right. That IIS splash page is not a dead end. Behind that blue window sits one of the most consistently misconfigured web servers on the www, and it’s begging you to look deeper. So let me walk you through how I approach IIS targets during bug bounty: table of contents psst, psst, IIS servers, where are you? shodan google dorking active tech fingerprinting ok, I found an IIS server. now what? internal IP disclosure pwn time nuclei templates: automate the boring stuff the HTTPAPI 2.0 dead end that isn’t IIS tilde enumeration: the gift that keeps giving using LLMs github dorks to resolve shortnames using BigQuery to resolve shortnames bruteforcing the rest with crunch fuzzing: the IIS-specific wordlist matters web.config: the keys to the kingdom path traversal to web.config bin directory DLL exposure via cookieless sessions reverse proxy path confusion…