[{"id":3772121,"new_policy":"# Introduction\nThe Department of State (DOS) is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.\n\nThis policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.\n\nWe encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems in accordance with this policy.\n\n# Authorization\nIf you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorized, we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and Department of State will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known to such third party.\n\n# Guidelines\nUnder this policy, “research” means activities in which you:\n\n* Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.\n* Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.\n* Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.\n* Provide us a reasonable amount of time (typically 100 calendar days) to resolve the issue before coordinated disclosure.\n* Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.\n\nOnce you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), medical information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.\n\n# Test Methods\nIn addition to any proscriptions in the guidelines above, the following test methods are NOT authorized:\n\n* Network denial or distributed denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data\n* Physical testing (e.g., office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g., phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing\n•\tUsing `-risk=3` is explicilty prohibited if using `sqlmap`.\n\n# Scope\nThis policy applies to all Department internet accessible systems and services to include those in the Scope section.  \n\nVulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at vdpsubmission@state.gov before starting your research (or at the security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS).\n\nWe ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.\n\n# Out-Of-Scope\n•\tClickjacking on pages with no sensitive actions\n•\tArchived GitHub repos are out of scope\n•\tArchiving subdomain takeover proofs-of-concept on archive.org, or any similar archiving site, is strictly prohibited. This constitutes an unauthorized public disclosure\n•\tMany sites share the same code base - please see the table below\n•\tIf a second researcher submits an already reported vulnerability against any of the sites in the table below, they will be closed as `Duplicate`\n•\tIf the same researcher submits duplicate reports against two or more of the sites in the table below, only the first will be accepted and the remaining will be closed as `N/A`\n•\tCross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) on unauthenticated forms or forms with no sensitive actions\n•\tAttacks requiring MITM or physical access to a user's device.\n•\tPreviously known vulnerable libraries without a working Proof of Concept.\n•\tComma Separated Values (CSV) injection without demonstrating a vulnerability.\n•\tMissing best practices in SSL/TLS configuration.\n•\tAny activity that could lead to the disruption of our service (DoS).\n•\tContent spoofing and text injection issues without showing an attack vector/without being able to modify HTML/CSS\n•\tRate limiting or brute force issues on non-authentication endpoints\n•\tMissing best practices in Content Security Policy.\n•\tMissing HTTP Only or Secure flags on cookies\n•\tMissing email best practices (Invalid, incomplete or missing SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, etc.)\n•\tVulnerabilities only affecting users of outdated or unpatched browsers [Less than 2 stable versions behind the latest released stable version]\n•\tSoftware version disclosure / Banner identification issues / Descriptive error messages or headers (e.g. stack traces, application or server errors).\n•\tTab nabbing \n•\tOpen redirect - unless an additional security impact can be demonstrated\n•\tIssues that require unlikely user interaction\n•\tUser enumeration, unless you can demonstrate that a brute force attack is likely to succeed.\n•\tSocial engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing, smishing)\n\n| Sites Sharing the Same Codebase (MWP) |\n|---|---|---|---|\n|ae.usembassy.gov|\ter.usembassy.gov|\tlv.usembassy.gov|\tshare.america.gov|\n|af.usembassy.gov|\tes.usembassy.gov|\tly.usembassy.gov|\tsi.usembassy.gov|\n|al.usembassy.gov|\tet.usembassy.gov|\tma.usembassy.gov|\tsk.usembassy.gov|\n|am.usembassy.gov|\tfi.usembassy.gov|\tmd.usembassy.gov|\tsl.usembassy.gov|\n|ao.usembassy.gov|\tfj.usembassy.gov|\tme.usembassy.gov|\tsm.usmission.gov|\n|ar.usembassy.gov|\tfm.usembassy.gov|\tmepi.state.gov|\t        sn.usembassy.gov|\n|asean.usmission.gov|\tfr.usembassy.gov|\tmg.usembassy.gov|\tso.usembassy.gov|\n|at.usembassy.gov|\tga.usembassy.gov|\tmh.usembassy.gov|\tspanmag.state.gov|\n|au.usembassy.gov|\tge.usembassy.gov|\tmk.usembassy.gov|\tsr.usembassy.gov|\n|az.usembassy.gov|\tgeneva.usmission.gov|\tml.usembassy.gov|\tss.usembassy.gov|\n|ba.usembassy.gov|\tgh.usembassy.gov|\tmm.usembassy.gov|\tsv.usembassy.gov|\n|bb.usembassy.gov|\tgm.usembassy.gov|\tmn.usembassy.gov|\tsy.usembassy.gov|\n|bd.usembassy.gov|\tgn.usembassy.gov|\tmr.usembassy.gov|\tsz.usembassy.gov|\n|be.usembassy.gov|\tgq.usembassy.gov|\tmt.usembassy.gov|\ttd.usembassy.gov|\n|bf.usembassy.gov|\tgr.usembassy.gov|\tmu.usembassy.gov|\ttg.usembassy.gov|\n|bg.usembassy.gov|\tgt.usembassy.gov|\tmw.usembassy.gov| \tth.usembassy.gov|\n|bh.usembassy.gov|\tgw.usmission.gov|\tmx.usembassy.gov|\ttj.usembassy.gov|\n|bi.usembassy.gov|\tgy.usembassy.gov|\tmy.usembassy.gov|\ttl.usembassy.gov|\n|bj.usembassy.gov|\thk.usconsulate.gov|\tmz.usembassy.gov|\ttm.usembassy.gov|\n|bm.usconsulate.gov|\thn.usembassy.gov|\tna.usembassy.gov|\ttn.usembassy.gov|\n|bn.usembassy.gov|\thr.usembassy.gov|\tnato.usmission.gov|\ttr.usembassy.gov|\n|bo.usembassy.gov|\tht.usembassy.gov|\tne.usembassy.gov|\ttt.usembassy.gov|\n|br.usembassy.gov|\thu.usembassy.gov|\tng.usembassy.gov|       tz.usembassy.gov|\n|bs.usembassy.gov|\ticao.usmission.gov|\tni.usembassy.gov|\tua.usembassy.gov|\n|bw.usembassy.gov|\tid.usembassy.gov|\tnl.usembassy.gov|\tug.usembassy.gov|\n|by.usembassy.gov|\tie.usembassy.gov|\tno.usembassy.gov|\tuk.usembassy.gov|\n|bz.usembassy.gov|\til.usembassy.gov|\tnp.usembassy.gov|\tusau.usmission.gov|\n|ca.usembassy.gov|\tin.usembassy.gov|\tnz.usembassy.gov|\tusembassy.gov|\n|cd.usembassy.gov|\tiq.usembassy.gov|\tom.usembassy.gov|\tuseu.usmission.gov|\n|cf.usembassy.gov|\tir.usembassy.gov|\tosce.usmission.gov|\tusoas.usmission.gov|\n|cg.usembassy.gov|\tis.usembassy.gov|\tpa.usembassy.gov|\tusoecd.usmission.gov|\n|ch.usembassy.gov|\tit.usembassy.gov|\tpe.usembassy.gov|\tusun.usmission.gov|\n|ci.usembassy.gov|\tjm.usembassy.gov|\tpg.usembassy.gov|\tusunrome.usmission.gov|\n|cl.usembassy.gov|\tjmh.usembassy.gov|\tph.usembassy.gov|\tuy.usembassy.gov|\n|cm.usembassy.gov|\tjo.usembassy.gov|\tpk.usembassy.gov|\tuz.usembassy.gov|\n|co.usembassy.gov|\tjp.usembassy.gov|\tpl.usembassy.gov|\tva.usembassy.gov|\n|cr.usembassy.gov|\tke.usembassy.gov|\tpt.usembassy.gov|\tve.usembassy.gov|\n|cu.usembassy.gov|\tkg.usembassy.gov|       pw.usembassy.gov|\tvienna.usmission.gov|\n|cv.usembassy.gov|\tkh.usembassy.gov|\tpy.usembassy.gov|\tvn.usembassy.gov|\n|cw.usconsulate.gov|\tkm.usembassy.gov| \tqa.usembassy.gov|\tws.usembassy.gov|\n|cy.usembassy.gov|\tkr.usembassy.gov|\tro.usembassy.gov|\txk.usembassy.gov|\n|cz.usembassy.gov|\tkw.usembassy.gov|\trs.usembassy.gov|\tyali.state.gov|\n|de.usembassy.gov|\tkz.usembassy.gov|\tru.usembassy.gov|\tye.usembassy.gov|\n|dj.usembassy.gov|\tla.usembassy.gov|\trw.usembassy.gov|\tylai.state.gov|\n|dk.usembassy.gov|\tlb.usembassy.gov|\tsa.usembassy.gov|\tza.usembassy.gov|\n|do.usembassy.gov|\tlk.usembassy.gov|\tsb.usembassy.gov|\tzm.usembassy.gov|\n|dz.usembassy.gov|\tlr.usembassy.gov|\tsc.usembassy.gov|\tzw.usembassy.gov|\n|ec.usembassy.gov|\tls.usembassy.gov|\tsd.usembassy.gov|\t\n|ee.usembassy.gov|\tlt.usembassy.gov|\tse.usembassy.gov|\t\n|eg.usembassy.gov|\tlu.usembassy.gov|\tsg.usembassy.gov|\n\n# Reporting a Vulnerability\nInformation submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely the Department of State, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process (https://www.cisa.gov/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure-process). We may also share your report with other U.S. Government entities if required by law or regulation. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission.\n\n## What we would like to see from you\nIn order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:\n\n* Describe when the vulnerability was discovered, its location, and the potential impact of exploitation.\n* Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots (if they don’t contain sensitive data) are helpful).\n* Provide a mitigation recommendation and include any related technical information.\n* Be in English, if possible.\n\n## What you can expect from us\nWhen you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.\n\n* Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.\n* To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.\n* We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.\n\n# Questions\nQuestions regarding this policy may be sent to vdpsubmission@state.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.\n\n#Legal\nThis policy does not authorize, give permission, or otherwise allow express or implied access to DOS information systems to any individual, group of individuals, consortium, partnership, or any other business or legal entity. However, if a security researcher working in accordance with the terms and conditions of this VDP program discloses a vulnerability, then: (1) DOS will, in the exercise of its authorities, take the following steps to: (1) not initiate or recommend any law enforcement action or civil actions related to such activities against that researcher, and (2) if required, inform the pertinent law enforcement agencies or civil plaintiffs that researcher activities were, to the best of our knowledge, conducted pursuant to, and in compliance, with the terms and conditions of the program.\n\nYou must otherwise comply with all applicable Federal, State, and local laws in connection with your security research activities. You may not engage in any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity that is inconsistent with terms and conditions of the program or the law. If you engage in any activities that are inconsistent with the terms and conditions of the program or the law, you will not be considered a security researcher and may be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.\n\nTo the extent that any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity involves the networks, systems, information, applications, products, or services of a non-DOS entity (e.g., other Federal departments or agencies; State, local, or tribal governments; private sector companies or persons; employees or personnel of any such entities; or any other such third party), that non-DOS entity may independently determine whether to pursue legal action or remedies related to such activities.\n\nDOS may modify the terms and conditions or terminate the program at any time.\n","has_open_scope":null,"pays_within_one_month":null,"protected_by_gold_standard_safe_harbor":null,"protected_by_ai_safe_harbor":null,"disclosure_declaration":null,"introduction":null,"platform_standards_exclusions":[],"exemplary_standards_exclusions":[],"scope_exclusions":[],"timestamp":"2026-04-03T20:08:15.895Z"},{"id":3772120,"new_policy":"# Introduction\nThe Department of State (DOS) is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.\n\nThis policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.\n\nWe encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems in accordance with this policy.\n\n# Authorization\nIf you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorized, we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and Department of State will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known to such third party.\n\n# Guidelines\nUnder this policy, “research” means activities in which you:\n\n* Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.\n* Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.\n* Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.\n* Provide us a reasonable amount of time (typically 100 calendar days) to resolve the issue before coordinated disclosure.\n* Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.\n\nOnce you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), medical information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.\n\n# Test Methods\nIn addition to any proscriptions in the guidelines above, the following test methods are NOT authorized:\n\n* Network denial or distributed denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data\n* Physical testing (e.g., office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g., phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing\n•\tUsing `-risk=3` is explicilty prohibited if using `sqlmap`.\n\n# Scope\nThis policy applies to all Department internet accessible systems and services to include those in the Scope section.  \n\nVulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at vdpsubmission@state.gov before starting your research (or at the security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS).\n\nWe ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.\n\n# Out-Of-Scope\n•\tClickjacking on pages with no sensitive actions\n•\tArchived GitHub repos are out of scope\n•\tArchiving subdomain takeover proofs-of-concept on archive.org, or any similar archiving site, is strictly prohibited. This constitutes an unauthorized public disclosure\n•\tMany sites share the same code base - please see the table below\n•\tIf a second researcher submits an already reported vulnerability against any of the sites in the table below, they will be closed as `Duplicate`\n•\tIf the same researcher submits duplicate reports against two or more of the sites in the table below, only the first will be accepted and the remaining will be closed as `N/A`\n•\tCross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) on unauthenticated forms or forms with no sensitive actions\n•\tAttacks requiring MITM or physical access to a user's device.\n•\tPreviously known vulnerable libraries without a working Proof of Concept.\n•\tComma Separated Values (CSV) injection without demonstrating a vulnerability.\n•\tMissing best practices in SSL/TLS configuration.\n•\tAny activity that could lead to the disruption of our service (DoS).\n•\tContent spoofing and text injection issues without showing an attack vector/without being able to modify HTML/CSS\n•\tRate limiting or brute force issues on non-authentication endpoints\n•\tMissing best practices in Content Security Policy.\n•\tMissing HTTP Only or Secure flags on cookies\n•\tMissing email best practices (Invalid, incomplete or missing SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, etc.)\n•\tVulnerabilities only affecting users of outdated or unpatched browsers [Less than 2 stable versions behind the latest released stable version]\n•\tSoftware version disclosure / Banner identification issues / Descriptive error messages or headers (e.g. stack traces, application or server errors).\n•\tTab nabbing \n•\tOpen redirect - unless an additional security impact can be demonstrated\n•\tIssues that require unlikely user interaction\n•\tUser enumeration, unless you can demonstrate that a brute force attack is likely to succeed.\n•\tSocial engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing, smishing)\n\n| Sites Sharing the Same Codebase (MWP) |\n|---|---|---|---|\n|ae.usembassy.gov|\ter.usembassy.gov|\tlv.usembassy.gov|\tshare.america.gov|\n|af.usembassy.gov|\tes.usembassy.gov|\tly.usembassy.gov|\tsi.usembassy.gov|\n|al.usembassy.gov|\tet.usembassy.gov|\tma.usembassy.gov|\tsk.usembassy.gov|\n|am.usembassy.gov|\tfi.usembassy.gov|\tmd.usembassy.gov|\tsl.usembassy.gov|\n|ao.usembassy.gov|\tfj.usembassy.gov|\tme.usembassy.gov|\tsm.usmission.gov|\n|ar.usembassy.gov|\tfm.usembassy.gov|\tmepi.state.gov|\t        sn.usembassy.gov|\n|asean.usmission.gov|\tfr.usembassy.gov|\tmg.usembassy.gov|\tso.usembassy.gov|\n|at.usembassy.gov|\tga.usembassy.gov|\tmh.usembassy.gov|\tspanmag.state.gov|\n|au.usembassy.gov|\tge.usembassy.gov|\tmk.usembassy.gov|\tsr.usembassy.gov|\n|az.usembassy.gov|\tgeneva.usmission.gov|\tml.usembassy.gov|\tss.usembassy.gov|\n|ba.usembassy.gov|\tgh.usembassy.gov|\tmm.usembassy.gov|\tsv.usembassy.gov|\n|bb.usembassy.gov|\tgm.usembassy.gov|\tmn.usembassy.gov|\tsy.usembassy.gov|\n|bd.usembassy.gov|\tgn.usembassy.gov|\tmr.usembassy.gov|\tsz.usembassy.gov|\n|be.usembassy.gov|\tgq.usembassy.gov|\tmt.usembassy.gov|\ttd.usembassy.gov|\n|bf.usembassy.gov|\tgr.usembassy.gov|\tmu.usembassy.gov|\ttg.usembassy.gov|\n|bg.usembassy.gov|\tgt.usembassy.gov|\tmw.usembassy.gov| \tth.usembassy.gov|\n|bh.usembassy.gov|\tgw.usmission.gov|\tmx.usembassy.gov|\ttj.usembassy.gov|\n|bi.usembassy.gov|\tgy.usembassy.gov|\tmy.usembassy.gov|\ttl.usembassy.gov|\n|bj.usembassy.gov|\thk.usconsulate.gov|\tmz.usembassy.gov|\ttm.usembassy.gov|\n|bm.usconsulate.gov|\thn.usembassy.gov|\tna.usembassy.gov|\ttn.usembassy.gov|\n|bn.usembassy.gov|\thr.usembassy.gov|\tnato.usmission.gov\ttr.usembassy.gov|\n|bo.usembassy.gov|\tht.usembassy.gov|\tne.usembassy.gov|\ttt.usembassy.gov|\n|br.usembassy.gov|\thu.usembassy.gov|\tng.usembassy.gov|       tz.usembassy.gov|\n|bs.usembassy.gov|\ticao.usmission.gov|\tni.usembassy.gov|\tua.usembassy.gov|\n|bw.usembassy.gov|\tid.usembassy.gov|\tnl.usembassy.gov|\tug.usembassy.gov|\n|by.usembassy.gov|\tie.usembassy.gov|\tno.usembassy.gov|\tuk.usembassy.gov|\n|bz.usembassy.gov|\til.usembassy.gov|\tnp.usembassy.gov|\tusau.usmission.gov|\n|ca.usembassy.gov|\tin.usembassy.gov|\tnz.usembassy.gov|\tusembassy.gov|\n|cd.usembassy.gov|\tiq.usembassy.gov|\tom.usembassy.gov|\tuseu.usmission.gov|\n|cf.usembassy.gov|\tir.usembassy.gov|\tosce.usmission.gov|\tusoas.usmission.gov|\n|cg.usembassy.gov|\tis.usembassy.gov|\tpa.usembassy.gov|\tusoecd.usmission.gov|\n|ch.usembassy.gov|\tit.usembassy.gov|\tpe.usembassy.gov|\tusun.usmission.gov|\n|ci.usembassy.gov|\tjm.usembassy.gov|\tpg.usembassy.gov|\tusunrome.usmission.gov|\n|cl.usembassy.gov|\tjmh.usembassy.gov|\tph.usembassy.gov|\tuy.usembassy.gov|\n|cm.usembassy.gov|\tjo.usembassy.gov|\tpk.usembassy.gov|\tuz.usembassy.gov|\n|co.usembassy.gov|\tjp.usembassy.gov|\tpl.usembassy.gov|\tva.usembassy.gov|\n|cr.usembassy.gov|\tke.usembassy.gov|\tpt.usembassy.gov|\tve.usembassy.gov|\n|cu.usembassy.gov|\tkg.usembassy.gov|       pw.usembassy.gov|\tvienna.usmission.gov|\n|cv.usembassy.gov|\tkh.usembassy.gov|\tpy.usembassy.gov|\tvn.usembassy.gov|\n|cw.usconsulate.gov|\tkm.usembassy.gov| \tqa.usembassy.gov|\tws.usembassy.gov|\n|cy.usembassy.gov|\tkr.usembassy.gov|\tro.usembassy.gov|\txk.usembassy.gov|\n|cz.usembassy.gov|\tkw.usembassy.gov|\trs.usembassy.gov|\tyali.state.gov|\n|de.usembassy.gov|\tkz.usembassy.gov|\tru.usembassy.gov|\tye.usembassy.gov|\n|dj.usembassy.gov|\tla.usembassy.gov|\trw.usembassy.gov|\tylai.state.gov|\n|dk.usembassy.gov|\tlb.usembassy.gov|\tsa.usembassy.gov|\tza.usembassy.gov|\n|do.usembassy.gov|\tlk.usembassy.gov|\tsb.usembassy.gov|\tzm.usembassy.gov|\n|dz.usembassy.gov|\tlr.usembassy.gov|\tsc.usembassy.gov|\tzw.usembassy.gov|\n|ec.usembassy.gov|\tls.usembassy.gov|\tsd.usembassy.gov|\t\n|ee.usembassy.gov|\tlt.usembassy.gov|\tse.usembassy.gov|\t\n|eg.usembassy.gov|\tlu.usembassy.gov|\tsg.usembassy.gov|\n\n# Reporting a Vulnerability\nInformation submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely the Department of State, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process (https://www.cisa.gov/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure-process). We may also share your report with other U.S. Government entities if required by law or regulation. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission.\n\n## What we would like to see from you\nIn order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:\n\n* Describe when the vulnerability was discovered, its location, and the potential impact of exploitation.\n* Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots (if they don’t contain sensitive data) are helpful).\n* Provide a mitigation recommendation and include any related technical information.\n* Be in English, if possible.\n\n## What you can expect from us\nWhen you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.\n\n* Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.\n* To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.\n* We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.\n\n# Questions\nQuestions regarding this policy may be sent to vdpsubmission@state.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.\n\n#Legal\nThis policy does not authorize, give permission, or otherwise allow express or implied access to DOS information systems to any individual, group of individuals, consortium, partnership, or any other business or legal entity. However, if a security researcher working in accordance with the terms and conditions of this VDP program discloses a vulnerability, then: (1) DOS will, in the exercise of its authorities, take the following steps to: (1) not initiate or recommend any law enforcement action or civil actions related to such activities against that researcher, and (2) if required, inform the pertinent law enforcement agencies or civil plaintiffs that researcher activities were, to the best of our knowledge, conducted pursuant to, and in compliance, with the terms and conditions of the program.\n\nYou must otherwise comply with all applicable Federal, State, and local laws in connection with your security research activities. You may not engage in any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity that is inconsistent with terms and conditions of the program or the law. If you engage in any activities that are inconsistent with the terms and conditions of the program or the law, you will not be considered a security researcher and may be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.\n\nTo the extent that any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity involves the networks, systems, information, applications, products, or services of a non-DOS entity (e.g., other Federal departments or agencies; State, local, or tribal governments; private sector companies or persons; employees or personnel of any such entities; or any other such third party), that non-DOS entity may independently determine whether to pursue legal action or remedies related to such activities.\n\nDOS may modify the terms and conditions or terminate the program at any time.\n","has_open_scope":null,"pays_within_one_month":null,"protected_by_gold_standard_safe_harbor":null,"protected_by_ai_safe_harbor":null,"disclosure_declaration":null,"introduction":null,"platform_standards_exclusions":[],"exemplary_standards_exclusions":[],"scope_exclusions":[],"timestamp":"2026-04-03T20:06:09.430Z"},{"id":3772119,"new_policy":"# Introduction\nThe Department of State (DOS) is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.\n\nThis policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.\n\nWe encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems in accordance with this policy.\n\n# Authorization\nIf you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorized, we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and Department of State will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known to such third party.\n\n# Guidelines\nUnder this policy, “research” means activities in which you:\n\n* Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.\n* Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.\n* Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.\n* Provide us a reasonable amount of time (typically 100 calendar days) to resolve the issue before coordinated disclosure.\n* Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.\n\nOnce you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), medical information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.\n\n# Test Methods\nIn addition to any proscriptions in the guidelines above, the following test methods are NOT authorized:\n\n* Network denial or distributed denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data\n* Physical testing (e.g., office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g., phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing\n•\tUsing `-risk=3` is explicilty prohibited if using `sqlmap`.\n\n# Scope\nThis policy applies to all Department internet accessible systems and services to include those in the Scope section.  \n\nVulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at vdpsubmission@state.gov before starting your research (or at the security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS).\n\nWe ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.\n\n# Out-Of-Scope\n•\tClickjacking on pages with no sensitive actions\n•\tArchived GitHub repos are out of scope\n•\tArchiving subdomain takeover proofs-of-concept on archive.org, or any similar archiving site, is strictly prohibited. This constitutes an unauthorized public disclosure\n•\tMany sites share the same code base - please see the table below\n•\tIf a second researcher submits an already reported vulnerability against any of the sites in the table below, they will be closed as `Duplicate`\n•\tIf the same researcher submits duplicate reports against two or more of the sites in the table below, only the first will be accepted and the remaining will be closed as `N/A`\n•\tCross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) on unauthenticated forms or forms with no sensitive actions\n•\tAttacks requiring MITM or physical access to a user's device.\n•\tPreviously known vulnerable libraries without a working Proof of Concept.\n•\tComma Separated Values (CSV) injection without demonstrating a vulnerability.\n•\tMissing best practices in SSL/TLS configuration.\n•\tAny activity that could lead to the disruption of our service (DoS).\n•\tContent spoofing and text injection issues without showing an attack vector/without being able to modify HTML/CSS\n•\tRate limiting or brute force issues on non-authentication endpoints\n•\tMissing best practices in Content Security Policy.\n•\tMissing HTTP Only or Secure flags on cookies\n•\tMissing email best practices (Invalid, incomplete or missing SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, etc.)\n•\tVulnerabilities only affecting users of outdated or unpatched browsers [Less than 2 stable versions behind the latest released stable version]\n•\tSoftware version disclosure / Banner identification issues / Descriptive error messages or headers (e.g. stack traces, application or server errors).\n•\tTab nabbing \n•\tOpen redirect - unless an additional security impact can be demonstrated\n•\tIssues that require unlikely user interaction\n•\tUser enumeration, unless you can demonstrate that a brute force attack is likely to succeed.\n•\tSocial engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing, smishing)\n\n| Sites Sharing the Same Codebase (MWP) |\n|---|---|---|---|\n| ae.usembassy.gov | er.usembassy.gov | lv.usembassy.gov | share.america.gov |\n\n# Reporting a Vulnerability\nInformation submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely the Department of State, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process (https://www.cisa.gov/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure-process). We may also share your report with other U.S. Government entities if required by law or regulation. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission.\n\n## What we would like to see from you\nIn order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:\n\n* Describe when the vulnerability was discovered, its location, and the potential impact of exploitation.\n* Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots (if they don’t contain sensitive data) are helpful).\n* Provide a mitigation recommendation and include any related technical information.\n* Be in English, if possible.\n\n## What you can expect from us\nWhen you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.\n\n* Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.\n* To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.\n* We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.\n\n# Questions\nQuestions regarding this policy may be sent to vdpsubmission@state.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.\n\n#Legal\nThis policy does not authorize, give permission, or otherwise allow express or implied access to DOS information systems to any individual, group of individuals, consortium, partnership, or any other business or legal entity. However, if a security researcher working in accordance with the terms and conditions of this VDP program discloses a vulnerability, then: (1) DOS will, in the exercise of its authorities, take the following steps to: (1) not initiate or recommend any law enforcement action or civil actions related to such activities against that researcher, and (2) if required, inform the pertinent law enforcement agencies or civil plaintiffs that researcher activities were, to the best of our knowledge, conducted pursuant to, and in compliance, with the terms and conditions of the program.\n\nYou must otherwise comply with all applicable Federal, State, and local laws in connection with your security research activities. You may not engage in any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity that is inconsistent with terms and conditions of the program or the law. If you engage in any activities that are inconsistent with the terms and conditions of the program or the law, you will not be considered a security researcher and may be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.\n\nTo the extent that any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity involves the networks, systems, information, applications, products, or services of a non-DOS entity (e.g., other Federal departments or agencies; State, local, or tribal governments; private sector companies or persons; employees or personnel of any such entities; or any other such third party), that non-DOS entity may independently determine whether to pursue legal action or remedies related to such activities.\n\nDOS may modify the terms and conditions or terminate the program at any time.\n","has_open_scope":null,"pays_within_one_month":null,"protected_by_gold_standard_safe_harbor":null,"protected_by_ai_safe_harbor":null,"disclosure_declaration":null,"introduction":null,"platform_standards_exclusions":[],"exemplary_standards_exclusions":[],"scope_exclusions":[],"timestamp":"2026-04-03T19:58:14.208Z"},{"id":3772118,"new_policy":"# Introduction\nThe Department of State (DOS) is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.\n\nThis policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.\n\nWe encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems in accordance with this policy.\n\n# Authorization\nIf you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorized, we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and Department of State will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known to such third party.\n\n# Guidelines\nUnder this policy, “research” means activities in which you:\n\n* Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.\n* Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.\n* Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.\n* Provide us a reasonable amount of time (typically 100 calendar days) to resolve the issue before coordinated disclosure.\n* Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.\n\nOnce you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), medical information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.\n\n# Test Methods\nIn addition to any proscriptions in the guidelines above, the following test methods are NOT authorized:\n\n* Network denial or distributed denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data\n* Physical testing (e.g., office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g., phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing\n•\tUsing `-risk=3` is explicilty prohibited if using `sqlmap`.\n\n# Scope\nThis policy applies to all Department internet accessible systems and services to include those in the Scope section.  \n\nVulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at vdpsubmission@state.gov before starting your research (or at the security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS).\n\nWe ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.\n\n# Out-Of-Scope\n•\tClickjacking on pages with no sensitive actions\n•\tArchived GitHub repos are out of scope\n•\tArchiving subdomain takeover proofs-of-concept on archive.org, or any similar archiving site, is strictly prohibited. This constitutes an unauthorized public disclosure\n•\tMany sites share the same code base - please see the table below\n•\tIf a second researcher submits an already reported vulnerability against any of the sites in the table below, they will be closed as `Duplicate`\n•\tIf the same researcher submits duplicate reports against two or more of the sites in the table below, only the first will be accepted and the remaining will be closed as `N/A`\n•\tCross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) on unauthenticated forms or forms with no sensitive actions\n•\tAttacks requiring MITM or physical access to a user's device.\n•\tPreviously known vulnerable libraries without a working Proof of Concept.\n•\tComma Separated Values (CSV) injection without demonstrating a vulnerability.\n•\tMissing best practices in SSL/TLS configuration.\n•\tAny activity that could lead to the disruption of our service (DoS).\n•\tContent spoofing and text injection issues without showing an attack vector/without being able to modify HTML/CSS\n•\tRate limiting or brute force issues on non-authentication endpoints\n•\tMissing best practices in Content Security Policy.\n•\tMissing HTTP Only or Secure flags on cookies\n•\tMissing email best practices (Invalid, incomplete or missing SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, etc.)\n•\tVulnerabilities only affecting users of outdated or unpatched browsers [Less than 2 stable versions behind the latest released stable version]\n•\tSoftware version disclosure / Banner identification issues / Descriptive error messages or headers (e.g. stack traces, application or server errors).\n•\tTab nabbing \n•\tOpen redirect - unless an additional security impact can be demonstrated\n•\tIssues that require unlikely user interaction\n•\tUser enumeration, unless you can demonstrate that a brute force attack is likely to succeed.\n•\tSocial engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing, smishing)\n\n| Sites Sharing the Same Codebase (MWP) |\n| --- | --- | --- | --- |\n| ae.usembassy.gov | er.usembassy.gov | lv.usembassy.gov | share.america.gov |\n\n# Reporting a Vulnerability\nInformation submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely the Department of State, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process (https://www.cisa.gov/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure-process). We may also share your report with other U.S. Government entities if required by law or regulation. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission.\n\n## What we would like to see from you\nIn order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:\n\n* Describe when the vulnerability was discovered, its location, and the potential impact of exploitation.\n* Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots (if they don’t contain sensitive data) are helpful).\n* Provide a mitigation recommendation and include any related technical information.\n* Be in English, if possible.\n\n## What you can expect from us\nWhen you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.\n\n* Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.\n* To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.\n* We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.\n\n# Questions\nQuestions regarding this policy may be sent to vdpsubmission@state.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.\n\n#Legal\nThis policy does not authorize, give permission, or otherwise allow express or implied access to DOS information systems to any individual, group of individuals, consortium, partnership, or any other business or legal entity. However, if a security researcher working in accordance with the terms and conditions of this VDP program discloses a vulnerability, then: (1) DOS will, in the exercise of its authorities, take the following steps to: (1) not initiate or recommend any law enforcement action or civil actions related to such activities against that researcher, and (2) if required, inform the pertinent law enforcement agencies or civil plaintiffs that researcher activities were, to the best of our knowledge, conducted pursuant to, and in compliance, with the terms and conditions of the program.\n\nYou must otherwise comply with all applicable Federal, State, and local laws in connection with your security research activities. You may not engage in any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity that is inconsistent with terms and conditions of the program or the law. If you engage in any activities that are inconsistent with the terms and conditions of the program or the law, you will not be considered a security researcher and may be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.\n\nTo the extent that any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity involves the networks, systems, information, applications, products, or services of a non-DOS entity (e.g., other Federal departments or agencies; State, local, or tribal governments; private sector companies or persons; employees or personnel of any such entities; or any other such third party), that non-DOS entity may independently determine whether to pursue legal action or remedies related to such activities.\n\nDOS may modify the terms and conditions or terminate the program at any time.\n","has_open_scope":null,"pays_within_one_month":null,"protected_by_gold_standard_safe_harbor":null,"protected_by_ai_safe_harbor":null,"disclosure_declaration":null,"introduction":null,"platform_standards_exclusions":[],"exemplary_standards_exclusions":[],"scope_exclusions":[],"timestamp":"2026-04-03T19:56:55.085Z"},{"id":3772117,"new_policy":"# Introduction\nThe Department of State (DOS) is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.\n\nThis policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.\n\nWe encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems in accordance with this policy.\n\n# Authorization\nIf you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorized, we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and Department of State will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known to such third party.\n\n# Guidelines\nUnder this policy, “research” means activities in which you:\n\n* Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.\n* Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.\n* Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.\n* Provide us a reasonable amount of time (typically 100 calendar days) to resolve the issue before coordinated disclosure.\n* Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.\n\nOnce you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), medical information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.\n\n# Test Methods\nIn addition to any proscriptions in the guidelines above, the following test methods are NOT authorized:\n\n* Network denial or distributed denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data\n* Physical testing (e.g., office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g., phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing\n•\tUsing `-risk=3` is explicilty prohibited if using `sqlmap`.\n\n# Scope\nThis policy applies to all Department internet accessible systems and services to include those in the Scope section.  \n\nVulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at vdpsubmission@state.gov before starting your research (or at the security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS).\n\nWe ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.\n\n# Out-Of-Scope\n•\tClickjacking on pages with no sensitive actions\n•\tArchived GitHub repos are out of scope\n•\tArchiving subdomain takeover proofs-of-concept on archive.org, or any similar archiving site, is strictly prohibited. This constitutes an unauthorized public disclosure\n•\tMany sites share the same code base - please see the table below\n•\tIf a second researcher submits an already reported vulnerability against any of the sites in the table below, they will be closed as `Duplicate`\n•\tIf the same researcher submits duplicate reports against two or more of the sites in the table below, only the first will be accepted and the remaining will be closed as `N/A`\n•\tCross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) on unauthenticated forms or forms with no sensitive actions\n•\tAttacks requiring MITM or physical access to a user's device.\n•\tPreviously known vulnerable libraries without a working Proof of Concept.\n•\tComma Separated Values (CSV) injection without demonstrating a vulnerability.\n•\tMissing best practices in SSL/TLS configuration.\n•\tAny activity that could lead to the disruption of our service (DoS).\n•\tContent spoofing and text injection issues without showing an attack vector/without being able to modify HTML/CSS\n•\tRate limiting or brute force issues on non-authentication endpoints\n•\tMissing best practices in Content Security Policy.\n•\tMissing HTTP Only or Secure flags on cookies\n•\tMissing email best practices (Invalid, incomplete or missing SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, etc.)\n•\tVulnerabilities only affecting users of outdated or unpatched browsers [Less than 2 stable versions behind the latest released stable version]\n•\tSoftware version disclosure / Banner identification issues / Descriptive error messages or headers (e.g. stack traces, application or server errors).\n•\tTab nabbing\n•\tOpen redirect - unless an additional security impact can be demonstrated\n•\tIssues that require unlikely user interaction\n•\tUser enumeration, unless you can demonstrate that a brute force attack is likely to succeed.\n•\tSocial engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing, smishing)\n\n| Sites Sharing the Same Codebase (MWP) |\n| --- | --- | --- | --- |\n| ae.usembassy.gov |\ter.usembassy.gov |\t lv.usembassy.gov |\t share.america.gov |\n\n# Reporting a Vulnerability\nInformation submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely the Department of State, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process (https://www.cisa.gov/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure-process). We may also share your report with other U.S. Government entities if required by law or regulation. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission.\n\n## What we would like to see from you\nIn order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:\n\n* Describe when the vulnerability was discovered, its location, and the potential impact of exploitation.\n* Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots (if they don’t contain sensitive data) are helpful).\n* Provide a mitigation recommendation and include any related technical information.\n* Be in English, if possible.\n\n## What you can expect from us\nWhen you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.\n\n* Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.\n* To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.\n* We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.\n\n# Questions\nQuestions regarding this policy may be sent to vdpsubmission@state.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.\n\n#Legal\nThis policy does not authorize, give permission, or otherwise allow express or implied access to DOS information systems to any individual, group of individuals, consortium, partnership, or any other business or legal entity. However, if a security researcher working in accordance with the terms and conditions of this VDP program discloses a vulnerability, then: (1) DOS will, in the exercise of its authorities, take the following steps to: (1) not initiate or recommend any law enforcement action or civil actions related to such activities against that researcher, and (2) if required, inform the pertinent law enforcement agencies or civil plaintiffs that researcher activities were, to the best of our knowledge, conducted pursuant to, and in compliance, with the terms and conditions of the program.\n\nYou must otherwise comply with all applicable Federal, State, and local laws in connection with your security research activities. You may not engage in any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity that is inconsistent with terms and conditions of the program or the law. If you engage in any activities that are inconsistent with the terms and conditions of the program or the law, you will not be considered a security researcher and may be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.\n\nTo the extent that any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity involves the networks, systems, information, applications, products, or services of a non-DOS entity (e.g., other Federal departments or agencies; State, local, or tribal governments; private sector companies or persons; employees or personnel of any such entities; or any other such third party), that non-DOS entity may independently determine whether to pursue legal action or remedies related to such activities.\n\nDOS may modify the terms and conditions or terminate the program at any time.\n","has_open_scope":null,"pays_within_one_month":null,"protected_by_gold_standard_safe_harbor":null,"protected_by_ai_safe_harbor":null,"disclosure_declaration":null,"introduction":null,"platform_standards_exclusions":[],"exemplary_standards_exclusions":[],"scope_exclusions":[],"timestamp":"2026-04-03T19:55:50.796Z"},{"id":3772116,"new_policy":"# Introduction\nThe Department of State (DOS) is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.\n\nThis policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.\n\nWe encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems in accordance with this policy.\n\n# Authorization\nIf you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorized, we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and Department of State will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known to such third party.\n\n# Guidelines\nUnder this policy, “research” means activities in which you:\n\n* Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.\n* Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.\n* Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.\n* Provide us a reasonable amount of time (typically 100 calendar days) to resolve the issue before coordinated disclosure.\n* Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.\n\nOnce you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), medical information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.\n\n# Test Methods\nIn addition to any proscriptions in the guidelines above, the following test methods are NOT authorized:\n\n* Network denial or distributed denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data\n* Physical testing (e.g., office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g., phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing\n•\tUsing `-risk=3` is explicilty prohibited if using `sqlmap`.\n\n# Scope\nThis policy applies to all Department internet accessible systems and services to include those in the Scope section.  \n\nVulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at vdpsubmission@state.gov before starting your research (or at the security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS).\n\nWe ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.\n\n# Out-Of-Scope\n•\tClickjacking on pages with no sensitive actions\n•\tArchived GitHub repos are out of scope\n•\tArchiving subdomain takeover proofs-of-concept on archive.org, or any similar archiving site, is strictly prohibited. This constitutes an unauthorized public disclosure\n•\tMany sites share the same code base - please see the table below\n•\tIf a second researcher submits an already reported vulnerability against any of the sites in the table below, they will be closed as `Duplicate`\n•\tIf the same researcher submits duplicate reports against two or more of the sites in the table below, only the first will be accepted and the remaining will be closed as `N/A`\n•\tCross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) on unauthenticated forms or forms with no sensitive actions\n•\tAttacks requiring MITM or physical access to a user's device.\n•\tPreviously known vulnerable libraries without a working Proof of Concept.\n•\tComma Separated Values (CSV) injection without demonstrating a vulnerability.\n•\tMissing best practices in SSL/TLS configuration.\n•\tAny activity that could lead to the disruption of our service (DoS).\n•\tContent spoofing and text injection issues without showing an attack vector/without being able to modify HTML/CSS\n•\tRate limiting or brute force issues on non-authentication endpoints\n•\tMissing best practices in Content Security Policy.\n•\tMissing HTTP Only or Secure flags on cookies\n•\tMissing email best practices (Invalid, incomplete or missing SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, etc.)\n•\tVulnerabilities only affecting users of outdated or unpatched browsers [Less than 2 stable versions behind the latest released stable version]\n•\tSoftware version disclosure / Banner identification issues / Descriptive error messages or headers (e.g. stack traces, application or server errors).\n•\tTab nabbing\n•\tOpen redirect - unless an additional security impact can be demonstrated\n•\tIssues that require unlikely user interaction\n•\tUser enumeration, unless you can demonstrate that a brute force attack is likely to succeed.\n•\tSocial engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing, smishing)\n\n| Sites Sharing the Same Codebase (MWP) |\n| --- | --- |\n| ae.usembassy.gov |\ter.usembassy.gov |\t lv.usembassy.gov |\t share.america.gov |\n\n# Reporting a Vulnerability\nInformation submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely the Department of State, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process (https://www.cisa.gov/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure-process). We may also share your report with other U.S. Government entities if required by law or regulation. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission.\n\n## What we would like to see from you\nIn order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:\n\n* Describe when the vulnerability was discovered, its location, and the potential impact of exploitation.\n* Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots (if they don’t contain sensitive data) are helpful).\n* Provide a mitigation recommendation and include any related technical information.\n* Be in English, if possible.\n\n## What you can expect from us\nWhen you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.\n\n* Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.\n* To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.\n* We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.\n\n# Questions\nQuestions regarding this policy may be sent to vdpsubmission@state.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.\n\n#Legal\nThis policy does not authorize, give permission, or otherwise allow express or implied access to DOS information systems to any individual, group of individuals, consortium, partnership, or any other business or legal entity. However, if a security researcher working in accordance with the terms and conditions of this VDP program discloses a vulnerability, then: (1) DOS will, in the exercise of its authorities, take the following steps to: (1) not initiate or recommend any law enforcement action or civil actions related to such activities against that researcher, and (2) if required, inform the pertinent law enforcement agencies or civil plaintiffs that researcher activities were, to the best of our knowledge, conducted pursuant to, and in compliance, with the terms and conditions of the program.\n\nYou must otherwise comply with all applicable Federal, State, and local laws in connection with your security research activities. You may not engage in any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity that is inconsistent with terms and conditions of the program or the law. If you engage in any activities that are inconsistent with the terms and conditions of the program or the law, you will not be considered a security researcher and may be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.\n\nTo the extent that any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity involves the networks, systems, information, applications, products, or services of a non-DOS entity (e.g., other Federal departments or agencies; State, local, or tribal governments; private sector companies or persons; employees or personnel of any such entities; or any other such third party), that non-DOS entity may independently determine whether to pursue legal action or remedies related to such activities.\n\nDOS may modify the terms and conditions or terminate the program at any time.\n","has_open_scope":null,"pays_within_one_month":null,"protected_by_gold_standard_safe_harbor":null,"protected_by_ai_safe_harbor":null,"disclosure_declaration":null,"introduction":null,"platform_standards_exclusions":[],"exemplary_standards_exclusions":[],"scope_exclusions":[],"timestamp":"2026-04-03T19:54:27.948Z"},{"id":3772115,"new_policy":"# Introduction\nThe Department of State (DOS) is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.\n\nThis policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.\n\nWe encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems in accordance with this policy.\n\n# Authorization\nIf you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorized, we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and Department of State will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known to such third party.\n\n# Guidelines\nUnder this policy, “research” means activities in which you:\n\n* Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.\n* Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.\n* Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.\n* Provide us a reasonable amount of time (typically 100 calendar days) to resolve the issue before coordinated disclosure.\n* Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.\n\nOnce you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), medical information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.\n\n# Test Methods\nIn addition to any proscriptions in the guidelines above, the following test methods are NOT authorized:\n\n* Network denial or distributed denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data\n* Physical testing (e.g., office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g., phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing\n•\tUsing `-risk=3` is explicilty prohibited if using `sqlmap`.\n\n# Scope\nThis policy applies to all Department internet accessible systems and services to include those in the Scope section.  \n\nVulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at vdpsubmission@state.gov before starting your research (or at the security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS).\n\nWe ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.\n\n# Out-Of-Scope\n•\tClickjacking on pages with no sensitive actions\n•\tArchived GitHub repos are out of scope\n•\tArchiving subdomain takeover proofs-of-concept on archive.org, or any similar archiving site, is strictly prohibited. This constitutes an unauthorized public disclosure\n•\tMany sites share the same code base - please see the table below\n•\tIf a second researcher submits an already reported vulnerability against any of the sites in the table below, they will be closed as `Duplicate`\n•\tIf the same researcher submits duplicate reports against two or more of the sites in the table below, only the first will be accepted and the remaining will be closed as `N/A`\n•\tCross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) on unauthenticated forms or forms with no sensitive actions\n•\tAttacks requiring MITM or physical access to a user's device.\n•\tPreviously known vulnerable libraries without a working Proof of Concept.\n•\tComma Separated Values (CSV) injection without demonstrating a vulnerability.\n•\tMissing best practices in SSL/TLS configuration.\n•\tAny activity that could lead to the disruption of our service (DoS).\n•\tContent spoofing and text injection issues without showing an attack vector/without being able to modify HTML/CSS\n•\tRate limiting or brute force issues on non-authentication endpoints\n•\tMissing best practices in Content Security Policy.\n•\tMissing HTTP Only or Secure flags on cookies\n•\tMissing email best practices (Invalid, incomplete or missing SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, etc.)\n•\tVulnerabilities only affecting users of outdated or unpatched browsers [Less than 2 stable versions behind the latest released stable version]\n•\tSoftware version disclosure / Banner identification issues / Descriptive error messages or headers (e.g. stack traces, application or server errors).\n•\tTab nabbing\n•\tOpen redirect - unless an additional security impact can be demonstrated\n•\tIssues that require unlikely user interaction\n•\tUser enumeration, unless you can demonstrate that a brute force attack is likely to succeed.\n•\tSocial engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing, smishing)\n\n| Sites Sharing the Same Codebase (MWP) |\n| --- | --- |\n| ae.usembassy.gov |\t | er.usembassy.gov |\t | lv.usembassy.gov |\t | share.america.gov |\n\n# Reporting a Vulnerability\nInformation submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely the Department of State, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process (https://www.cisa.gov/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure-process). We may also share your report with other U.S. Government entities if required by law or regulation. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission.\n\n## What we would like to see from you\nIn order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:\n\n* Describe when the vulnerability was discovered, its location, and the potential impact of exploitation.\n* Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots (if they don’t contain sensitive data) are helpful).\n* Provide a mitigation recommendation and include any related technical information.\n* Be in English, if possible.\n\n## What you can expect from us\nWhen you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.\n\n* Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.\n* To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.\n* We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.\n\n# Questions\nQuestions regarding this policy may be sent to vdpsubmission@state.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.\n\n#Legal\nThis policy does not authorize, give permission, or otherwise allow express or implied access to DOS information systems to any individual, group of individuals, consortium, partnership, or any other business or legal entity. However, if a security researcher working in accordance with the terms and conditions of this VDP program discloses a vulnerability, then: (1) DOS will, in the exercise of its authorities, take the following steps to: (1) not initiate or recommend any law enforcement action or civil actions related to such activities against that researcher, and (2) if required, inform the pertinent law enforcement agencies or civil plaintiffs that researcher activities were, to the best of our knowledge, conducted pursuant to, and in compliance, with the terms and conditions of the program.\n\nYou must otherwise comply with all applicable Federal, State, and local laws in connection with your security research activities. You may not engage in any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity that is inconsistent with terms and conditions of the program or the law. If you engage in any activities that are inconsistent with the terms and conditions of the program or the law, you will not be considered a security researcher and may be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.\n\nTo the extent that any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity involves the networks, systems, information, applications, products, or services of a non-DOS entity (e.g., other Federal departments or agencies; State, local, or tribal governments; private sector companies or persons; employees or personnel of any such entities; or any other such third party), that non-DOS entity may independently determine whether to pursue legal action or remedies related to such activities.\n\nDOS may modify the terms and conditions or terminate the program at any time.\n","has_open_scope":null,"pays_within_one_month":null,"protected_by_gold_standard_safe_harbor":null,"protected_by_ai_safe_harbor":null,"disclosure_declaration":null,"introduction":null,"platform_standards_exclusions":[],"exemplary_standards_exclusions":[],"scope_exclusions":[],"timestamp":"2026-04-03T19:52:51.320Z"},{"id":3772114,"new_policy":"# Introduction\nThe Department of State (DOS) is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.\n\nThis policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.\n\nWe encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems in accordance with this policy.\n\n# Authorization\nIf you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorized, we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and Department of State will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known to such third party.\n\n# Guidelines\nUnder this policy, “research” means activities in which you:\n\n* Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.\n* Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.\n* Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.\n* Provide us a reasonable amount of time (typically 100 calendar days) to resolve the issue before coordinated disclosure.\n* Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.\n\nOnce you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), medical information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.\n\n# Test Methods\nIn addition to any proscriptions in the guidelines above, the following test methods are NOT authorized:\n\n* Network denial or distributed denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data\n* Physical testing (e.g., office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g., phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing\n•\tUsing `-risk=3` is explicilty prohibited if using `sqlmap`.\n\n# Scope\nThis policy applies to all Department internet accessible systems and services to include those in the Scope section.  \n\nVulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at vdpsubmission@state.gov before starting your research (or at the security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS).\n\nWe ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.\n\n# Out-Of-Scope\n•\tClickjacking on pages with no sensitive actions\n•\tArchived GitHub repos are out of scope\n•\tArchiving subdomain takeover proofs-of-concept on archive.org, or any similar archiving site, is strictly prohibited. This constitutes an unauthorized public disclosure\n•\tMany sites share the same code base - please see the table below\n•\tIf a second researcher submits an already reported vulnerability against any of the sites in the table below, they will be closed as `Duplicate`\n•\tIf the same researcher submits duplicate reports against two or more of the sites in the table below, only the first will be accepted and the remaining will be closed as `N/A`\n•\tCross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) on unauthenticated forms or forms with no sensitive actions\n•\tAttacks requiring MITM or physical access to a user's device.\n•\tPreviously known vulnerable libraries without a working Proof of Concept.\n•\tComma Separated Values (CSV) injection without demonstrating a vulnerability.\n•\tMissing best practices in SSL/TLS configuration.\n•\tAny activity that could lead to the disruption of our service (DoS).\n•\tContent spoofing and text injection issues without showing an attack vector/without being able to modify HTML/CSS\n•\tRate limiting or brute force issues on non-authentication endpoints\n•\tMissing best practices in Content Security Policy.\n•\tMissing HTTP Only or Secure flags on cookies\n•\tMissing email best practices (Invalid, incomplete or missing SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, etc.)\n•\tVulnerabilities only affecting users of outdated or unpatched browsers [Less than 2 stable versions behind the latest released stable version]\n•\tSoftware version disclosure / Banner identification issues / Descriptive error messages or headers (e.g. stack traces, application or server errors).\n•\tTab nabbing\n•\tOpen redirect - unless an additional security impact can be demonstrated\n•\tIssues that require unlikely user interaction\n•\tUser enumeration, unless you can demonstrate that a brute force attack is likely to succeed.\n•\tSocial engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing, smishing)\n\n| Sites Sharing the Same Codebase (MWP) |\n| --- | --- |\n|ae.usembassy.gov|\t |er.usembassy.gov|\t |lv.usembassy.gov|\t |share.america.gov|\n\n# Reporting a Vulnerability\nInformation submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely the Department of State, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process (https://www.cisa.gov/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure-process). We may also share your report with other U.S. Government entities if required by law or regulation. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission.\n\n## What we would like to see from you\nIn order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:\n\n* Describe when the vulnerability was discovered, its location, and the potential impact of exploitation.\n* Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots (if they don’t contain sensitive data) are helpful).\n* Provide a mitigation recommendation and include any related technical information.\n* Be in English, if possible.\n\n## What you can expect from us\nWhen you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.\n\n* Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.\n* To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.\n* We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.\n\n# Questions\nQuestions regarding this policy may be sent to vdpsubmission@state.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.\n\n#Legal\nThis policy does not authorize, give permission, or otherwise allow express or implied access to DOS information systems to any individual, group of individuals, consortium, partnership, or any other business or legal entity. However, if a security researcher working in accordance with the terms and conditions of this VDP program discloses a vulnerability, then: (1) DOS will, in the exercise of its authorities, take the following steps to: (1) not initiate or recommend any law enforcement action or civil actions related to such activities against that researcher, and (2) if required, inform the pertinent law enforcement agencies or civil plaintiffs that researcher activities were, to the best of our knowledge, conducted pursuant to, and in compliance, with the terms and conditions of the program.\n\nYou must otherwise comply with all applicable Federal, State, and local laws in connection with your security research activities. You may not engage in any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity that is inconsistent with terms and conditions of the program or the law. If you engage in any activities that are inconsistent with the terms and conditions of the program or the law, you will not be considered a security researcher and may be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.\n\nTo the extent that any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity involves the networks, systems, information, applications, products, or services of a non-DOS entity (e.g., other Federal departments or agencies; State, local, or tribal governments; private sector companies or persons; employees or personnel of any such entities; or any other such third party), that non-DOS entity may independently determine whether to pursue legal action or remedies related to such activities.\n\nDOS may modify the terms and conditions or terminate the program at any time.\n","has_open_scope":null,"pays_within_one_month":null,"protected_by_gold_standard_safe_harbor":null,"protected_by_ai_safe_harbor":null,"disclosure_declaration":null,"introduction":null,"platform_standards_exclusions":[],"exemplary_standards_exclusions":[],"scope_exclusions":[],"timestamp":"2026-04-03T19:51:18.660Z"},{"id":3772113,"new_policy":"# Introduction\nThe Department of State (DOS) is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.\n\nThis policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.\n\nWe encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems in accordance with this policy.\n\n# Authorization\nIf you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorized, we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and Department of State will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known to such third party.\n\n# Guidelines\nUnder this policy, “research” means activities in which you:\n\n* Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.\n* Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.\n* Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.\n* Provide us a reasonable amount of time (typically 100 calendar days) to resolve the issue before coordinated disclosure.\n* Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.\n\nOnce you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), medical information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.\n\n# Test Methods\nIn addition to any proscriptions in the guidelines above, the following test methods are NOT authorized:\n\n* Network denial or distributed denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data\n* Physical testing (e.g., office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g., phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing\n•\tUsing `-risk=3` is explicilty prohibited if using `sqlmap`.\n\n# Scope\nThis policy applies to all Department internet accessible systems and services to include those in the Scope section.  \n\nVulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at vdpsubmission@state.gov before starting your research (or at the security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS).\n\nWe ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.\n\n# Out-Of-Scope\n•\tClickjacking on pages with no sensitive actions\n•\tArchived GitHub repos are out of scope\n•\tArchiving subdomain takeover proofs-of-concept on archive.org, or any similar archiving site, is strictly prohibited. This constitutes an unauthorized public disclosure\n•\tMany sites share the same code base - please see the table below\n•\tIf a second researcher submits an already reported vulnerability against any of the sites in the table below, they will be closed as `Duplicate`\n•\tIf the same researcher submits duplicate reports against two or more of the sites in the table below, only the first will be accepted and the remaining will be closed as `N/A`\n•\tCross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) on unauthenticated forms or forms with no sensitive actions\n•\tAttacks requiring MITM or physical access to a user's device.\n•\tPreviously known vulnerable libraries without a working Proof of Concept.\n•\tComma Separated Values (CSV) injection without demonstrating a vulnerability.\n•\tMissing best practices in SSL/TLS configuration.\n•\tAny activity that could lead to the disruption of our service (DoS).\n•\tContent spoofing and text injection issues without showing an attack vector/without being able to modify HTML/CSS\n•\tRate limiting or brute force issues on non-authentication endpoints\n•\tMissing best practices in Content Security Policy.\n•\tMissing HTTP Only or Secure flags on cookies\n•\tMissing email best practices (Invalid, incomplete or missing SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, etc.)\n•\tVulnerabilities only affecting users of outdated or unpatched browsers [Less than 2 stable versions behind the latest released stable version]\n•\tSoftware version disclosure / Banner identification issues / Descriptive error messages or headers (e.g. stack traces, application or server errors).\n•\tTab nabbing\n•\tOpen redirect - unless an additional security impact can be demonstrated\n•\tIssues that require unlikely user interaction\n•\tUser enumeration, unless you can demonstrate that a brute force attack is likely to succeed.\n•\tSocial engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing, smishing)\n\n| Sites Sharing the Same Codebase (MWP) |\n| --- | --- |\n|ae.usembassy.gov|\ter.usembassy.gov|\tlv.usembassy.gov|\tshare.america.gov|\n\n# Reporting a Vulnerability\nInformation submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely the Department of State, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process (https://www.cisa.gov/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure-process). We may also share your report with other U.S. Government entities if required by law or regulation. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission.\n\n## What we would like to see from you\nIn order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:\n\n* Describe when the vulnerability was discovered, its location, and the potential impact of exploitation.\n* Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots (if they don’t contain sensitive data) are helpful).\n* Provide a mitigation recommendation and include any related technical information.\n* Be in English, if possible.\n\n## What you can expect from us\nWhen you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.\n\n* Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.\n* To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.\n* We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.\n\n# Questions\nQuestions regarding this policy may be sent to vdpsubmission@state.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.\n\n#Legal\nThis policy does not authorize, give permission, or otherwise allow express or implied access to DOS information systems to any individual, group of individuals, consortium, partnership, or any other business or legal entity. However, if a security researcher working in accordance with the terms and conditions of this VDP program discloses a vulnerability, then: (1) DOS will, in the exercise of its authorities, take the following steps to: (1) not initiate or recommend any law enforcement action or civil actions related to such activities against that researcher, and (2) if required, inform the pertinent law enforcement agencies or civil plaintiffs that researcher activities were, to the best of our knowledge, conducted pursuant to, and in compliance, with the terms and conditions of the program.\n\nYou must otherwise comply with all applicable Federal, State, and local laws in connection with your security research activities. You may not engage in any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity that is inconsistent with terms and conditions of the program or the law. If you engage in any activities that are inconsistent with the terms and conditions of the program or the law, you will not be considered a security researcher and may be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.\n\nTo the extent that any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity involves the networks, systems, information, applications, products, or services of a non-DOS entity (e.g., other Federal departments or agencies; State, local, or tribal governments; private sector companies or persons; employees or personnel of any such entities; or any other such third party), that non-DOS entity may independently determine whether to pursue legal action or remedies related to such activities.\n\nDOS may modify the terms and conditions or terminate the program at any time.\n","has_open_scope":null,"pays_within_one_month":null,"protected_by_gold_standard_safe_harbor":null,"protected_by_ai_safe_harbor":null,"disclosure_declaration":null,"introduction":null,"platform_standards_exclusions":[],"exemplary_standards_exclusions":[],"scope_exclusions":[],"timestamp":"2026-04-03T19:48:09.246Z"},{"id":3772112,"new_policy":"# Introduction\nThe Department of State (DOS) is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.\n\nThis policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.\n\nWe encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems in accordance with this policy.\n\n# Authorization\nIf you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorized, we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and Department of State will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known to such third party.\n\n# Guidelines\nUnder this policy, “research” means activities in which you:\n\n* Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.\n* Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.\n* Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.\n* Provide us a reasonable amount of time (typically 100 calendar days) to resolve the issue before coordinated disclosure.\n* Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.\n\nOnce you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), medical information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.\n\n# Test Methods\nIn addition to any proscriptions in the guidelines above, the following test methods are NOT authorized:\n\n* Network denial or distributed denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data\n* Physical testing (e.g., office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g., phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing\n•\tUsing `-risk=3` is explicilty prohibited if using `sqlmap`.\n\n# Scope\nThis policy applies to all Department internet accessible systems and services to include those in the Scope section.  \n\nVulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at vdpsubmission@state.gov before starting your research (or at the security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS).\n\nWe ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.\n\n# Out-Of-Scope\n•\tClickjacking on pages with no sensitive actions\n•\tArchived GitHub repos are out of scope\n•\tArchiving subdomain takeover proofs-of-concept on archive.org, or any similar archiving site, is strictly prohibited. This constitutes an unauthorized public disclosure\n•\tMany sites share the same code base - please see the table below\n•\tIf a second researcher submits an already reported vulnerability against any of the sites in the table below, they will be closed as `Duplicate`\n•\tIf the same researcher submits duplicate reports against two or more of the sites in the table below, only the first will be accepted and the remaining will be closed as `N/A`\n•\tCross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) on unauthenticated forms or forms with no sensitive actions\n•\tAttacks requiring MITM or physical access to a user's device.\n•\tPreviously known vulnerable libraries without a working Proof of Concept.\n•\tComma Separated Values (CSV) injection without demonstrating a vulnerability.\n•\tMissing best practices in SSL/TLS configuration.\n•\tAny activity that could lead to the disruption of our service (DoS).\n•\tContent spoofing and text injection issues without showing an attack vector/without being able to modify HTML/CSS\n•\tRate limiting or brute force issues on non-authentication endpoints\n•\tMissing best practices in Content Security Policy.\n•\tMissing HTTP Only or Secure flags on cookies\n•\tMissing email best practices (Invalid, incomplete or missing SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, etc.)\n•\tVulnerabilities only affecting users of outdated or unpatched browsers [Less than 2 stable versions behind the latest released stable version]\n•\tSoftware version disclosure / Banner identification issues / Descriptive error messages or headers (e.g. stack traces, application or server errors).\n•\tTab nabbing\n•\tOpen redirect - unless an additional security impact can be demonstrated\n•\tIssues that require unlikely user interaction\n•\tUser enumeration, unless you can demonstrate that a brute force attack is likely to succeed.\n•\tSocial engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing, smishing)\n\n| Sites Sharing the Same Codebase (MWP) |\n| --- | --- |\n|ae.usembassy.gov|\t|er.usembassy.gov|\t|lv.usembassy.gov|\t|share.america.gov|\n|af.usembassy.gov|\t|es.usembassy.gov|\t|ly.usembassy.gov|\t|si.usembassy.gov|\n|al.usembassy.gov|\t|et.usembassy.gov|\t|ma.usembassy.gov|\t|sk.usembassy.gov|\n|am.usembassy.gov|\t|fi.usembassy.gov|\t|md.usembassy.gov|\t|sl.usembassy.gov|\n|ao.usembassy.gov|\t|fj.usembassy.gov|\t|me.usembassy.gov|\t|sm.usmission.gov|\n|ar.usembassy.gov|\t|fm.usembassy.gov|\t|mepi.state.gov|\t|sn.usembassy.gov|\n|asean.usmission.gov|\t |fr.usembassy.gov|\t|mg.usembassy.gov|\t|so.usembassy.gov|\n|at.usembassy.gov|\t|ga.usembassy.gov|\t|mh.usembassy.gov|\t|spanmag.state.gov|\n|au.usembassy.gov|\t|ge.usembassy.gov|\t|mk.usembassy.gov|\t|sr.usembassy.gov|\n|az.usembassy.gov|\t|geneva.usmission.gov|\t|ml.usembassy.gov|\t|ss.usembassy.gov|\n|ba.usembassy.gov|\t|gh.usembassy.gov|\t|mm.usembassy.gov|\t|sv.usembassy.gov|\n|bb.usembassy.gov|\t|gm.usembassy.gov|\t|mn.usembassy.gov|\t|sy.usembassy.gov|\n|bd.usembassy.gov|\t|gn.usembassy.gov|\t|mr.usembassy.gov|\t|sz.usembassy.gov|\n|be.usembassy.gov|\t|gq.usembassy.gov|\t|mt.usembassy.gov|\t|td.usembassy.gov|\n|bf.usembassy.gov|\t|gr.usembassy.gov|\t|mu.usembassy.gov|\t|tg.usembassy.gov|\n|bg.usembassy.gov|\t|gt.usembassy.gov|\t|mw.usembassy.gov| \t|th.usembassy.gov|\n|bh.usembassy.gov|\t|gw.usmission.gov|\t|mx.usembassy.gov|\t |tj.usembassy.gov|\n|bi.usembassy.gov|\t|gy.usembassy.gov|\t|my.usembassy.gov|\t|tl.usembassy.gov|\n|bj.usembassy.gov|\t|hk.usconsulate.gov|\t|mz.usembassy.gov|\t |tm.usembassy.gov|\n|bm.usconsulate.gov|\t|hn.usembassy.gov|\t|na.usembassy.gov|\t|tn.usembassy.gov|\n|bn.usembassy.gov|\t|hr.usembassy.gov|\t|nato.usmission.gov|\t|tr.usembassy.gov|\n|bo.usembassy.gov|\t|ht.usembassy.gov|\t|ne.usembassy.gov|\t|tt.usembassy.gov|\n|br.usembassy.gov|\t|hu.usembassy.gov|\t|ng.usembassy.gov| |tz.usembassy.gov|\n|bs.usembassy.gov|\t|icao.usmission.gov|\t|ni.usembassy.gov|\t|ua.usembassy.gov|\n|bw.usembassy.gov|\t|id.usembassy.gov|\t|nl.usembassy.gov|\t|ug.usembassy.gov|\n|by.usembassy.gov|\t|ie.usembassy.gov|\t|no.usembassy.gov|\t|uk.usembassy.gov|\n|bz.usembassy.gov|\t|il.usembassy.gov|\t|np.usembassy.gov|\t|usau.usmission.gov|\n|ca.usembassy.gov|\t|in.usembassy.gov|\t|nz.usembassy.gov|\t|usembassy.gov|\n|cd.usembassy.gov|\t|iq.usembassy.gov|\t|om.usembassy.gov|\t|useu.usmission.gov|\n|cf.usembassy.gov|\t|ir.usembassy.gov|\t |osce.usmission.gov|\t |usoas.usmission.gov|\n|cg.usembassy.gov|\t|is.usembassy.gov|\t|pa.usembassy.gov|\t|usoecd.usmission.gov|\n|ch.usembassy.gov|\t|it.usembassy.gov|\t|pe.usembassy.gov|\t|usun.usmission.gov|\n|ci.usembassy.gov|\t|jm.usembassy.gov|\t|pg.usembassy.gov|\t|usunrome.usmission.gov|\n|cl.usembassy.gov|\tjmh.usembassy.gov|\t|ph.usembassy.gov|\t|uy.usembassy.gov|\n|cm.usembassy.gov|\t|jo.usembassy.gov|\t|pk.usembassy.gov|\t|uz.usembassy.gov|\n|co.usembassy.gov|\t|jp.usembassy.gov|\t|pl.usembassy.gov|\t|va.usembassy.gov|\n|cr.usembassy.gov|\t|ke.usembassy.gov|\t|pt.usembassy.gov|\t|ve.usembassy.gov|\n|cu.usembassy.gov|\t|kg.usembassy.gov| |pw.usembassy.gov|\t|vienna.usmission.gov|\n|cv.usembassy.gov|\t|kh.usembassy.gov|\t|py.usembassy.gov|\t|vn.usembassy.gov|\n|cw.usconsulate.gov|\t|km.usembassy.gov| \t|qa.usembassy.gov|\t|ws.usembassy.gov|\n|cy.usembassy.gov|\t|kr.usembassy.gov|\t|ro.usembassy.gov|\t|xk.usembassy.gov|\n|cz.usembassy.gov|\t|kw.usembassy.gov|\t|rs.usembassy.gov|\t |yali.state.gov|\n|de.usembassy.gov|\t|kz.usembassy.gov|\t|ru.usembassy.gov|\t|ye.usembassy.gov|\n|dj.usembassy.gov|\t|la.usembassy.gov|\t|rw.usembassy.gov|\t|ylai.state.gov|\n|dk.usembassy.gov|\t|lb.usembassy.gov|\t|sa.usembassy.gov|\t|za.usembassy.gov|\n|do.usembassy.gov|\t|lk.usembassy.gov|\t|sb.usembassy.gov|\t|zm.usembassy.gov|\n|dz.usembassy.gov|\t|lr.usembassy.gov|\t |sc.usembassy.gov|\t|zw.usembassy.gov|\n|ec.usembassy.gov|\t|ls.usembassy.gov|\t|sd.usembassy.gov|\t\n|ee.usembassy.gov|\t|lt.usembassy.gov|\t |se.usembassy.gov|\t\n|eg.usembassy.gov|\t|lu.usembassy.gov|\t|sg.usembassy.gov|\t\n\n# Reporting a Vulnerability\nInformation submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely the Department of State, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process (https://www.cisa.gov/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure-process). We may also share your report with other U.S. Government entities if required by law or regulation. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission.\n\n## What we would like to see from you\nIn order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:\n\n* Describe when the vulnerability was discovered, its location, and the potential impact of exploitation.\n* Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots (if they don’t contain sensitive data) are helpful).\n* Provide a mitigation recommendation and include any related technical information.\n* Be in English, if possible.\n\n## What you can expect from us\nWhen you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.\n\n* Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.\n* To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.\n* We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.\n\n# Questions\nQuestions regarding this policy may be sent to vdpsubmission@state.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.\n\n#Legal\nThis policy does not authorize, give permission, or otherwise allow express or implied access to DOS information systems to any individual, group of individuals, consortium, partnership, or any other business or legal entity. However, if a security researcher working in accordance with the terms and conditions of this VDP program discloses a vulnerability, then: (1) DOS will, in the exercise of its authorities, take the following steps to: (1) not initiate or recommend any law enforcement action or civil actions related to such activities against that researcher, and (2) if required, inform the pertinent law enforcement agencies or civil plaintiffs that researcher activities were, to the best of our knowledge, conducted pursuant to, and in compliance, with the terms and conditions of the program.\n\nYou must otherwise comply with all applicable Federal, State, and local laws in connection with your security research activities. You may not engage in any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity that is inconsistent with terms and conditions of the program or the law. If you engage in any activities that are inconsistent with the terms and conditions of the program or the law, you will not be considered a security researcher and may be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.\n\nTo the extent that any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity involves the networks, systems, information, applications, products, or services of a non-DOS entity (e.g., other Federal departments or agencies; State, local, or tribal governments; private sector companies or persons; employees or personnel of any such entities; or any other such third party), that non-DOS entity may independently determine whether to pursue legal action or remedies related to such activities.\n\nDOS may modify the terms and conditions or terminate the program at any time.\n","has_open_scope":null,"pays_within_one_month":null,"protected_by_gold_standard_safe_harbor":null,"protected_by_ai_safe_harbor":null,"disclosure_declaration":null,"introduction":null,"platform_standards_exclusions":[],"exemplary_standards_exclusions":[],"scope_exclusions":[],"timestamp":"2026-04-03T19:36:38.015Z"},{"id":3772111,"new_policy":"# Introduction\nThe Department of State (DOS) is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.\n\nThis policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.\n\nWe encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems in accordance with this policy.\n\n# Authorization\nIf you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorized, we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and Department of State will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known to such third party.\n\n# Guidelines\nUnder this policy, “research” means activities in which you:\n\n* Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.\n* Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.\n* Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.\n* Provide us a reasonable amount of time (typically 100 calendar days) to resolve the issue before coordinated disclosure.\n* Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.\n\nOnce you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), medical information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.\n\n# Test Methods\nIn addition to any proscriptions in the guidelines above, the following test methods are NOT authorized:\n\n* Network denial or distributed denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data\n* Physical testing (e.g., office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g., phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing\n•\tUsing `-risk=3` is explicilty prohibited if using `sqlmap`.\n\n# Scope\nThis policy applies to all Department internet accessible systems and services to include those in the Scope section.  \n\nVulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at vdpsubmission@state.gov before starting your research (or at the security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS).\n\nWe ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.\n\n# Out-Of-Scope\n•\tClickjacking on pages with no sensitive actions\n•\tArchived GitHub repos are out of scope\n•\tArchiving subdomain takeover proofs-of-concept on archive.org, or any similar archiving site, is strictly prohibited. This constitutes an unauthorized public disclosure\n•\tMany sites share the same code base - please see the table below\n•\tIf a second researcher submits an already reported vulnerability against any of the sites in the table below, they will be closed as `Duplicate`\n•\tIf the same researcher submits duplicate reports against two or more of the sites in the table below, only the first will be accepted and the remaining will be closed as `N/A`\n•\tCross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) on unauthenticated forms or forms with no sensitive actions\n•\tAttacks requiring MITM or physical access to a user's device.\n•\tPreviously known vulnerable libraries without a working Proof of Concept.\n•\tComma Separated Values (CSV) injection without demonstrating a vulnerability.\n•\tMissing best practices in SSL/TLS configuration.\n•\tAny activity that could lead to the disruption of our service (DoS).\n•\tContent spoofing and text injection issues without showing an attack vector/without being able to modify HTML/CSS\n•\tRate limiting or brute force issues on non-authentication endpoints\n•\tMissing best practices in Content Security Policy.\n•\tMissing HTTP Only or Secure flags on cookies\n•\tMissing email best practices (Invalid, incomplete or missing SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, etc.)\n•\tVulnerabilities only affecting users of outdated or unpatched browsers [Less than 2 stable versions behind the latest released stable version]\n•\tSoftware version disclosure / Banner identification issues / Descriptive error messages or headers (e.g. stack traces, application or server errors).\n•\tTab nabbing\n•\tOpen redirect - unless an additional security impact can be demonstrated\n•\tIssues that require unlikely user interaction\n•\tUser enumeration, unless you can demonstrate that a brute force attack is likely to succeed.\n•\tSocial engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing, smishing)\n\n| Sites Sharing the Same Codebase (MWP) |\n| --- | --- |\n|ae.usembassy.gov\t|er.usembassy.gov\t|lv.usembassy.gov\t|share.america.gov|\n|af.usembassy.gov\t|es.usembassy.gov\t|ly.usembassy.gov\t|si.usembassy.gov|\n|al.usembassy.gov\t|et.usembassy.gov\t|ma.usembassy.gov\t|sk.usembassy.gov|\n|am.usembassy.gov\t|fi.usembassy.gov\t|md.usembassy.gov\t|sl.usembassy.gov|\n|ao.usembassy.gov\t|fj.usembassy.gov\t|me.usembassy.gov\t|sm.usmission.gov|\n|ar.usembassy.gov\t|fm.usembassy.gov\t|mepi.state.gov\t|sn.usembassy.gov|\n|asean.usmission.gov\t |fr.usembassy.gov\t|mg.usembassy.gov\t|so.usembassy.gov|\n|at.usembassy.gov\t|ga.usembassy.gov\t|mh.usembassy.gov\t|spanmag.state.gov|\n|au.usembassy.gov\t|ge.usembassy.gov\t|mk.usembassy.gov\t|sr.usembassy.gov|\n|az.usembassy.gov\t|geneva.usmission.gov\t|ml.usembassy.gov\t|ss.usembassy.gov|\n|ba.usembassy.gov\t|gh.usembassy.gov\t|mm.usembassy.gov\t|sv.usembassy.gov|\n|bb.usembassy.gov\t|gm.usembassy.gov\t|mn.usembassy.gov\t|sy.usembassy.gov|\n|bd.usembassy.gov\t|gn.usembassy.gov\t|mr.usembassy.gov\t|sz.usembassy.gov|\n|be.usembassy.gov\t|gq.usembassy.gov\t|mt.usembassy.gov\t|td.usembassy.gov|\n|bf.usembassy.gov\t|gr.usembassy.gov\t|mu.usembassy.gov\t|tg.usembassy.gov|\n|bg.usembassy.gov\t|gt.usembassy.gov\t|mw.usembassy.gov \t|th.usembassy.gov|\n|bh.usembassy.gov\t|gw.usmission.gov\t|mx.usembassy.gov\t |tj.usembassy.gov|\n|bi.usembassy.gov\t|gy.usembassy.gov\t|my.usembassy.gov\t|tl.usembassy.gov|\n|bj.usembassy.gov\t|hk.usconsulate.gov\t|mz.usembassy.gov\t |tm.usembassy.gov|\n|bm.usconsulate.gov\t|hn.usembassy.gov\t|na.usembassy.gov\t|tn.usembassy.gov|\n|bn.usembassy.gov\t|hr.usembassy.gov\t|nato.usmission.gov\t|tr.usembassy.gov|\n|bo.usembassy.gov\t|ht.usembassy.gov\t|ne.usembassy.gov\t|tt.usembassy.gov|\n|br.usembassy.gov\t|hu.usembassy.gov\t|ng.usembassy.gov |tz.usembassy.gov|\n|bs.usembassy.gov\t|icao.usmission.gov\t|ni.usembassy.gov\t|ua.usembassy.gov|\n|bw.usembassy.gov\t|id.usembassy.gov\t|nl.usembassy.gov\t|ug.usembassy.gov|\n|by.usembassy.gov\t|ie.usembassy.gov\t|no.usembassy.gov\t|uk.usembassy.gov|\n|bz.usembassy.gov\t|il.usembassy.gov\t|np.usembassy.gov\t|usau.usmission.gov|\n|ca.usembassy.gov\t|in.usembassy.gov\t|nz.usembassy.gov\t|usembassy.gov|\n|cd.usembassy.gov\t|iq.usembassy.gov\t|om.usembassy.gov\t|useu.usmission.gov|\n|cf.usembassy.gov\t|ir.usembassy.gov\t |osce.usmission.gov\t |usoas.usmission.gov|\n|cg.usembassy.gov\t|is.usembassy.gov\t|pa.usembassy.gov\t|usoecd.usmission.gov|\n|ch.usembassy.gov\t|it.usembassy.gov\t|pe.usembassy.gov\t|usun.usmission.gov|\n|ci.usembassy.gov\t|jm.usembassy.gov\t|pg.usembassy.gov\t|usunrome.usmission.gov|\n|cl.usembassy.gov\tjmh.usembassy.gov\t|ph.usembassy.gov\t|uy.usembassy.gov|\n|cm.usembassy.gov\t|jo.usembassy.gov\t|pk.usembassy.gov\t|uz.usembassy.gov|\n|co.usembassy.gov\t|jp.usembassy.gov\t|pl.usembassy.gov\t|va.usembassy.gov|\n|cr.usembassy.gov\t|ke.usembassy.gov\t|pt.usembassy.gov\t|ve.usembassy.gov|\n|cu.usembassy.gov\t|kg.usembassy.gov\t|pw.usembassy.gov\t|vienna.usmission.gov|\n|cv.usembassy.gov\t|kh.usembassy.gov\t|py.usembassy.gov\t|vn.usembassy.gov|\n|cw.usconsulate.gov\t|km.usembassy.gov \t|qa.usembassy.gov\t|ws.usembassy.gov|\n|cy.usembassy.gov\t|kr.usembassy.gov\t|ro.usembassy.gov\t|xk.usembassy.gov|\n|cz.usembassy.gov\t|kw.usembassy.gov\t|rs.usembassy.gov\t |yali.state.gov|\n|de.usembassy.gov\t|kz.usembassy.gov\t|ru.usembassy.gov\t|ye.usembassy.gov|\n|dj.usembassy.gov\t|la.usembassy.gov\t|rw.usembassy.gov\t|ylai.state.gov|\n|dk.usembassy.gov\t|lb.usembassy.gov\t|sa.usembassy.gov\t|za.usembassy.gov|\n|do.usembassy.gov\t|lk.usembassy.gov\t|sb.usembassy.gov\t|zm.usembassy.gov|\n|dz.usembassy.gov\t|lr.usembassy.gov\t |sc.usembassy.gov\t|zw.usembassy.gov|\n|ec.usembassy.gov\t|ls.usembassy.gov\t|sd.usembassy.gov|\t\n|ee.usembassy.gov\t|lt.usembassy.gov\t |se.usembassy.gov|\t\n|eg.usembassy.gov\t|lu.usembassy.gov\t|sg.usembassy.gov|\t\n\n# Reporting a Vulnerability\nInformation submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely the Department of State, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process (https://www.cisa.gov/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure-process). We may also share your report with other U.S. Government entities if required by law or regulation. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission.\n\n## What we would like to see from you\nIn order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:\n\n* Describe when the vulnerability was discovered, its location, and the potential impact of exploitation.\n* Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots (if they don’t contain sensitive data) are helpful).\n* Provide a mitigation recommendation and include any related technical information.\n* Be in English, if possible.\n\n## What you can expect from us\nWhen you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.\n\n* Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.\n* To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.\n* We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.\n\n# Questions\nQuestions regarding this policy may be sent to vdpsubmission@state.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.\n\n#Legal\nThis policy does not authorize, give permission, or otherwise allow express or implied access to DOS information systems to any individual, group of individuals, consortium, partnership, or any other business or legal entity. However, if a security researcher working in accordance with the terms and conditions of this VDP program discloses a vulnerability, then: (1) DOS will, in the exercise of its authorities, take the following steps to: (1) not initiate or recommend any law enforcement action or civil actions related to such activities against that researcher, and (2) if required, inform the pertinent law enforcement agencies or civil plaintiffs that researcher activities were, to the best of our knowledge, conducted pursuant to, and in compliance, with the terms and conditions of the program.\n\nYou must otherwise comply with all applicable Federal, State, and local laws in connection with your security research activities. You may not engage in any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity that is inconsistent with terms and conditions of the program or the law. If you engage in any activities that are inconsistent with the terms and conditions of the program or the law, you will not be considered a security researcher and may be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.\n\nTo the extent that any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity involves the networks, systems, information, applications, products, or services of a non-DOS entity (e.g., other Federal departments or agencies; State, local, or tribal governments; private sector companies or persons; employees or personnel of any such entities; or any other such third party), that non-DOS entity may independently determine whether to pursue legal action or remedies related to such activities.\n\nDOS may modify the terms and conditions or terminate the program at any time.\n","has_open_scope":null,"pays_within_one_month":null,"protected_by_gold_standard_safe_harbor":null,"protected_by_ai_safe_harbor":null,"disclosure_declaration":null,"introduction":null,"platform_standards_exclusions":[],"exemplary_standards_exclusions":[],"scope_exclusions":[],"timestamp":"2026-04-03T19:24:30.596Z"},{"id":3771877,"new_policy":"# Introduction\nThe Department of State (DOS) is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.\n\nThis policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.\n\nWe encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems in accordance with this policy.\n\n# Authorization\nIf you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorized, we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and Department of State will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known to such third party.\n\n# Guidelines\nUnder this policy, “research” means activities in which you:\n\n* Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.\n* Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.\n* Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.\n* Provide us a reasonable amount of time (typically 100 calendar days) to resolve the issue before coordinated disclosure.\n* Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.\n\nOnce you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), medical information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.\n\n# Test Methods\nIn addition to any proscriptions in the guidelines above, the following test methods are NOT authorized:\n\n* Network denial or distributed denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data\n* Physical testing (e.g., office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g., phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing\n•\tUsing `-risk=3` is explicilty prohibited if using `sqlmap`.\n\n# Scope\nThis policy applies to all Department internet accessible systems and services to include those in the Scope section.  \n\nVulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at vdpsubmission@state.gov before starting your research (or at the security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS).\n\nWe ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.\n\n# Out-Of-Scope\n•\tClickjacking on pages with no sensitive actions\n•\tArchived GitHub repos are out of scope.\n•\tCross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) on unauthenticated forms or forms with no sensitive actions\n•\tAttacks requiring MITM or physical access to a user's device.\n•\tPreviously known vulnerable libraries without a working Proof of Concept.\n•\tComma Separated Values (CSV) injection without demonstrating a vulnerability.\n•\tMissing best practices in SSL/TLS configuration.\n•\tAny activity that could lead to the disruption of our service (DoS).\n•\tContent spoofing and text injection issues without showing an attack vector/without being able to modify HTML/CSS\n•\tRate limiting or brute force issues on non-authentication endpoints\n•\tMissing best practices in Content Security Policy.\n•\tMissing HTTP Only or Secure flags on cookies\n•\tMissing email best practices (Invalid, incomplete or missing SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, etc.)\n•\tVulnerabilities only affecting users of outdated or unpatched browsers [Less than 2 stable versions behind the latest released stable version]\n•\tSoftware version disclosure / Banner identification issues / Descriptive error messages or headers (e.g. stack traces, application or server errors).\n•\tTab nabbing\n•\tOpen redirect - unless an additional security impact can be demonstrated\n•\tIssues that require unlikely user interaction\n•\tUser enumeration, unless you can demonstrate that a brute force attack is likely to succeed.\n•\tSocial engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing, smishing)\n\n# Reporting a Vulnerability\nInformation submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely the Department of State, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process (https://www.cisa.gov/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure-process). We may also share your report with other U.S. Government entities if required by law or regulation. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission.\n\n## What we would like to see from you\nIn order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:\n\n* Describe when the vulnerability was discovered, its location, and the potential impact of exploitation.\n* Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots (if they don’t contain sensitive data) are helpful).\n* Provide a mitigation recommendation and include any related technical information.\n* Be in English, if possible.\n\n## What you can expect from us\nWhen you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.\n\n* Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.\n* To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.\n* We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.\n\n# Questions\nQuestions regarding this policy may be sent to vdpsubmission@state.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.\n\n#Legal\nThis policy does not authorize, give permission, or otherwise allow express or implied access to DOS information systems to any individual, group of individuals, consortium, partnership, or any other business or legal entity. However, if a security researcher working in accordance with the terms and conditions of this VDP program discloses a vulnerability, then: (1) DOS will, in the exercise of its authorities, take the following steps to: (1) not initiate or recommend any law enforcement action or civil actions related to such activities against that researcher, and (2) if required, inform the pertinent law enforcement agencies or civil plaintiffs that researcher activities were, to the best of our knowledge, conducted pursuant to, and in compliance, with the terms and conditions of the program.\n\nYou must otherwise comply with all applicable Federal, State, and local laws in connection with your security research activities. You may not engage in any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity that is inconsistent with terms and conditions of the program or the law. If you engage in any activities that are inconsistent with the terms and conditions of the program or the law, you will not be considered a security researcher and may be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.\n\nTo the extent that any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity involves the networks, systems, information, applications, products, or services of a non-DOS entity (e.g., other Federal departments or agencies; State, local, or tribal governments; private sector companies or persons; employees or personnel of any such entities; or any other such third party), that non-DOS entity may independently determine whether to pursue legal action or remedies related to such activities.\n\nDOS may modify the terms and conditions or terminate the program at any time.\n","has_open_scope":null,"pays_within_one_month":null,"protected_by_gold_standard_safe_harbor":null,"protected_by_ai_safe_harbor":null,"disclosure_declaration":null,"introduction":null,"platform_standards_exclusions":[],"exemplary_standards_exclusions":[],"scope_exclusions":[],"timestamp":"2026-03-30T17:14:15.070Z"},{"id":3713433,"new_policy":"# Introduction\nThe Department of State (DOS) is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.\n\nThis policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.\n\nWe encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems in accordance with this policy.\n\n# Authorization\nIf you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorized, we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and Department of State will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known to such third party.\n\n# Guidelines\nUnder this policy, “research” means activities in which you:\n\n* Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.\n* Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.\n* Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.\n* Provide us a reasonable amount of time (typically 100 calendar days) to resolve the issue before coordinated disclosure.\n* Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.\n\nOnce you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), medical information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.\n\n# Test Methods\nIn addition to any proscriptions in the guidelines above, the following test methods are NOT authorized:\n\n* Network denial or distributed denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data\n* Physical testing (e.g., office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g., phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing\n•\tUsing `-risk=3` is explicilty prohibited if using `sqlmap`.\n\n# Scope\nThis policy applies to all Department internet accessible systems and services to include those in the Scope section.  \n\nVulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at vdpsubmission@state.gov before starting your research (or at the security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS).\n\nWe ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.\n\n# Out-Of-Scope\n•\tClickjacking on pages with no sensitive actions\n•\tCross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) on unauthenticated forms or forms with no sensitive actions\n•\tAttacks requiring MITM or physical access to a user's device.\n•\tPreviously known vulnerable libraries without a working Proof of Concept.\n•\tComma Separated Values (CSV) injection without demonstrating a vulnerability.\n•\tMissing best practices in SSL/TLS configuration.\n•\tAny activity that could lead to the disruption of our service (DoS).\n•\tContent spoofing and text injection issues without showing an attack vector/without being able to modify HTML/CSS\n•\tRate limiting or bruteforce issues on non-authentication endpoints\n•\tMissing best practices in Content Security Policy.\n•\tMissing HttpOnly or Secure flags on cookies\n•\tMissing email best practices (Invalid, incomplete or missing SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, etc.)\n•\tVulnerabilities only affecting users of outdated or unpatched browsers [Less than 2 stable versions behind the latest released stable version]\n•\tSoftware version disclosure / Banner identification issues / Descriptive error messages or headers (e.g. stack traces, application or server errors).\n•\tTabnabbing\n•\tOpen redirect - unless an additional security impact can be demonstrated\n•\tIssues that require unlikely user interaction\n•\tUser enumeration, unless you can demonstrate that a brute force attack is likely to succeed.\n•\tSocial engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing, smishing)\n\n# Reporting a Vulnerability\nInformation submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely the Department of State, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process (https://www.cisa.gov/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure-process). We may also share your report with other U.S. Government entities if required by law or regulation. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission.\n\n## What we would like to see from you\nIn order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:\n\n* Describe when the vulnerability was discovered, its location, and the potential impact of exploitation.\n* Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots (if they don’t contain sensitive data) are helpful).\n* Provide a mitigation recommendation and include any related technical information.\n* Be in English, if possible.\n\n## What you can expect from us\nWhen you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.\n\n* Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.\n* To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.\n* We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.\n\n# Questions\nQuestions regarding this policy may be sent to vdpsubmission@state.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.\n\n#Legal\nThis policy does not authorize, give permission, or otherwise allow express or implied access to DOS information systems to any individual, group of individuals, consortium, partnership, or any other business or legal entity. However, if a security researcher working in accordance with the terms and conditions of this VDP program discloses a vulnerability, then: (1) DOS will, in the exercise of its authorities, take the following steps to: (1) not initiate or recommend any law enforcement action or civil actions related to such activities against that researcher, and (2) if required, inform the pertinent law enforcement agencies or civil plaintiffs that researcher activities were, to the best of our knowledge, conducted pursuant to, and in compliance, with the terms and conditions of the program.\n\nYou must otherwise comply with all applicable Federal, State, and local laws in connection with your security research activities. You may not engage in any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity that is inconsistent with terms and conditions of the program or the law. If you engage in any activities that are inconsistent with the terms and conditions of the program or the law, you will not be considered a security researcher and may be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.\n\nTo the extent that any security research or vulnerability disclosure activity involves the networks, systems, information, applications, products, or services of a non-DOS entity (e.g., other Federal departments or agencies; State, local, or tribal governments; private sector companies or persons; employees or personnel of any such entities; or any other such third party), that non-DOS entity may independently determine whether to pursue legal action or remedies related to such activities.\n\nDOS may modify the terms and conditions or terminate the program at any time.\n","has_open_scope":null,"pays_within_one_month":null,"protected_by_gold_standard_safe_harbor":null,"protected_by_ai_safe_harbor":null,"disclosure_declaration":null,"introduction":null,"platform_standards_exclusions":[],"exemplary_standards_exclusions":[],"scope_exclusions":[],"timestamp":"2024-02-29T16:56:09.984Z"},{"id":3713420,"new_policy":"# Introduction\nThe Department of State (DOS) is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.\n\nThis policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.\n\nWe encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems in accordance with this policy.\n\n# Authorization\nIf you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorized, we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and Department of State will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known to such third party.\n\n# Guidelines\nUnder this policy, “research” means activities in which you:\n\n* Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.\n* Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.\n* Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.\n* Provide us a reasonable amount of time (typically 100 calendar days) to resolve the issue before coordinated disclosure.\n* Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.\n\nOnce you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), medical information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.\n\n# Test Methods\nIn addition to any proscriptions in the guidelines above, the following test methods are NOT authorized:\n\n* Network denial or distributed denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data\n* Physical testing (e.g., office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g., phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing\n•\tUsing `-risk=3` is explicilty prohibited if using `sqlmap`.\n\n# Scope\nThis policy applies to all Department internet accessible systems and services to include those in the Scope section.  \n\nVulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at vdpsubmission@state.gov before starting your research (or at the security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS).\n\nWe ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.\n\n# Out-Of-Scope\n•\tClickjacking on pages with no sensitive actions\n•\tCross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) on unauthenticated forms or forms with no sensitive actions\n•\tAttacks requiring MITM or physical access to a user's device.\n•\tPreviously known vulnerable libraries without a working Proof of Concept.\n•\tComma Separated Values (CSV) injection without demonstrating a vulnerability.\n•\tMissing best practices in SSL/TLS configuration.\n•\tAny activity that could lead to the disruption of our service (DoS).\n•\tContent spoofing and text injection issues without showing an attack vector/without being able to modify HTML/CSS\n•\tRate limiting or bruteforce issues on non-authentication endpoints\n•\tMissing best practices in Content Security Policy.\n•\tMissing HttpOnly or Secure flags on cookies\n•\tMissing email best practices (Invalid, incomplete or missing SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, etc.)\n•\tVulnerabilities only affecting users of outdated or unpatched browsers [Less than 2 stable versions behind the latest released stable version]\n•\tSoftware version disclosure / Banner identification issues / Descriptive error messages or headers (e.g. stack traces, application or server errors).\n•\tTabnabbing\n•\tOpen redirect - unless an additional security impact can be demonstrated\n•\tIssues that require unlikely user interaction\n•\tUser enumeration, unless you can demonstrate that a brute force attack is likely to succeed.\n•\tSocial engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing, smishing)\n\n# Reporting a Vulnerability\nInformation submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely the Department of State, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process (https://www.cisa.gov/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure-process). We may also share your report with other U.S. Government entities if required by law or regulation. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission.\n\n## What we would like to see from you\nIn order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:\n\n* Describe when the vulnerability was discovered, its location, and the potential impact of exploitation.\n* Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots (if they don’t contain sensitive data) are helpful).\n* Provide a mitigation recommendation and include any related technical information.\n* Be in English, if possible.\n\n## What you can expect from us\nWhen you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.\n\n* Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.\n* To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.\n* We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.\n\n# Questions\nQuestions regarding this policy may be sent to vdpsubmission@state.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.\n","has_open_scope":null,"pays_within_one_month":null,"protected_by_gold_standard_safe_harbor":null,"protected_by_ai_safe_harbor":null,"disclosure_declaration":null,"introduction":null,"platform_standards_exclusions":[],"exemplary_standards_exclusions":[],"scope_exclusions":[],"timestamp":"2024-02-29T15:00:26.909Z"},{"id":3681177,"new_policy":"# Introduction\nThe Department of State (DOS) is committed to ensuring the security of the American public by protecting their information. This policy is intended to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our preferences in how to submit discovered vulnerabilities to us.\n\nThis policy describes what systems and types of research are covered under this policy, how to send us vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.\n\nWe encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our systems in accordance with this policy.\n\n# Authorization\nIf you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research, we will consider your research to be authorized, we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly, and Department of State will not recommend or pursue legal action related to your research. Should legal action be initiated by a third party against you for activities that were conducted in accordance with this policy, we will make this authorization known to such third party.\n\n# Guidelines\nUnder this policy, “research” means activities in which you:\n\n* Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential security issue.\n* Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.\n* Only use exploits to the extent necessary to confirm a vulnerability’s presence. Do not use an exploit to compromise or exfiltrate data, establish command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.\n* Provide us a reasonable amount of time (typically 100 calendar days) to resolve the issue before coordinated disclosure.\n* Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.\n\nOnce you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), medical information, financial information, or proprietary information or trade secrets of any party), you must stop your test, notify us immediately, and not disclose this data to anyone else.\n\n# Test Methods\nIn addition to any proscriptions in the guidelines above, the following test methods are not authorized:\n\n* Network denial or distributed denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data\n* Physical testing (e.g., office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g., phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing\n\n# Scope\nThis policy applies to all Department internet accessible systems and services to include those in the Scope section.  \n\nVulnerabilities found in systems from our vendors fall outside of this policy’s scope and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you aren’t sure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at vdpsubmission@state.gov before starting your research (or at the security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS).\n\nWe ask that active research and testing only be conducted on the systems and services covered by the scope of this document. If there is a particular system not in scope that you think merits testing, please contact us to discuss it first. We will increase the scope of this policy over time.\n\n# Reporting a Vulnerability\nInformation submitted under this policy will be used for defensive purposes only – to mitigate or remediate vulnerabilities. If your findings include newly discovered vulnerabilities that affect all users of a product or service and not solely the Department of State, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process (https://www.cisa.gov/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure-process). We may also share your report with other U.S. Government entities if required by law or regulation. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission.\n\n## What we would like to see from you\nIn order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:\n\n* Describe when the vulnerability was discovered, its location, and the potential impact of exploitation.\n* Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots (if they don’t contain sensitive data) are helpful).\n* Provide a mitigation recommendation and include any related technical information.\n* Be in English, if possible.\n\n## What you can expect from us\nWhen you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.\n\n* Within 3 business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.\n* To the best of our ability, we will confirm the existence of the vulnerability to you and be as transparent as possible about what steps we are taking during the remediation process, including on issues or challenges that may delay resolution.\n* We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.\n\n# Questions\nQuestions regarding this policy may be sent to vdpsubmission@state.gov. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.\n","has_open_scope":null,"pays_within_one_month":null,"protected_by_gold_standard_safe_harbor":null,"protected_by_ai_safe_harbor":null,"disclosure_declaration":null,"introduction":null,"platform_standards_exclusions":[],"exemplary_standards_exclusions":[],"scope_exclusions":[],"timestamp":"2022-12-14T14:46:46.380Z"}]