Reverse engineering a Web API
Introduction Most websites or web services have an API in the backend that delivers requested data to its frontend. This can be anything from the Google Search API to delivering a message on Discord. Some people in the gaming community scan a game’s username database for certain available special names, like 3 letter names, to register them. I’ve been asked to write a tool to automate that. To do that I had to reverse engineer the R6DB API. I then could use that API to check for available usernames programmatically. This API has shut down since, likely due to abuse. The method I’m going to show also works on Electron Apps such as Discord by bringing up the DevTools. For any other app, you can use something like Fiddler to intercept the web requests.