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Vulnerability Disclosure Policy

The National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) is committed to maintaining the security of all of our systems, including our electronic information systems, and protecting sensitive information from unauthorized disclosure.

This policy identifies certain information systems and types of security research implicated by federal Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) methodologies for cybersecurity risk management programs. It also describes how vulnerability reports should be forwarded to the Agency, and how long the Agency asks security reporters to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.

We encourage security researchers to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities identified in NLRB systems. For reports submitted in compliance with this policy, the NLRB will acknowledge receipt within three business days, endeavor to timely validate submissions, implement corrective actions if appropriate, and inform submitters of the disposition of reported vulnerabilities.

As a general policy, without specific promise or consideration, the Agency will consider reports received under the steps and procedures outlined herein to be evidence of good faith efforts to assist and comply with Agency vulnerability priorities, and will make reasonable efforts to resolve reported issues without recommendation of legal action. This statement does not constitute a waiver of any right or obligation on the part of the United States or the National Labor Relations Board.

Guidelines

Under this policy, “research” means activities in which you:

  • Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential cybersecurity issue.
  • Make every effort to avoid privacy violations, degradation of user experience, disruption to production systems, and destruction or manipulation of data.
  • 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.
  • Provide us a reasonable amount of time to resolve the issue before you disclose it publicly.
  • Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.

Once you’ve established that a vulnerability exists or encounter any sensitive data (including personally identifiable 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.

Test Methods

Security researchers are not authorized to:

  • test any system other than the systems set forth in the ‘Scope’ section below,
  • disclose vulnerability information except as set forth in the ‘Reporting a Vulnerability’ and ‘Disclosure’ sections below,
  • engage in physical testing of facilities or resources,
  • engage in social engineering,
  • send unsolicited electronic mail to NLRB users, including “phishing” messages,
  • execute or attempt to execute “Denial of Service” or “Resource Exhaustion” attacks,
  • introduce malicious software,
  • test in a manner which could degrade the operation of NLRB systems; or intentionally impair, disrupt, or disable NLRB systems,
  • test third-party applications, websites, or services that integrate with or link to or from NLRB systems,
  • delete, alter, share, retain, or destroy NLRB data, or render NLRB data inaccessible, or,
  • use an exploit to exfiltrate data, establish command line access, establish a persistent presence on NLRB systems, or “pivot” to other NLRB systems.

Security researchers may:

  • view or store NLRB nonpublic data only to the extent necessary to document the presence of a potential vulnerability.

Security researchers must:

  • cease testing and notify us immediately upon discovery of a vulnerability,
  • cease testing and notify us immediately upon discovery of an exposure of nonpublic data, and,
  • purge any stored NLRB nonpublic data upon reporting a vulnerability.

Scope

This policy applies to the following systems and services:

  • *.NLRB.gov

Any service not expressly listed above, such as any connected services, are excluded from scope and are not authorized for testing. Additionally, vulnerabilities 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 NLRBITSec@nlrb.gov before starting your research.

Though we develop and maintain other Internet-accessible systems or services, we 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 may increase the scope of this policy over time.

Reporting a Vulnerability

NLRB only accepts vulnerability reports via https://bugcrowd.com/nlrb-vdp. Acceptable message formats are plain text, rich text, and HTML.

Reports should provide a detailed technical description of the steps required to reproduce the vulnerability, including a description of any tools needed to identify or exploit the vulnerability. Images, screen captures, and other documents may be attached to reports. It is helpful to give attachments illustrative names. Reports may include proof-of-concept code that demonstrates exploitation of the vulnerability. We request that any scripts or exploit code be embedded into non-executable file types.

Researchers may submit reports anonymously or opt to provide contact information, and any preferred methods or times of day to communicate, as they see fit. We may contact researchers to clarify reported vulnerability information or other technical interchange.

By submitting a report to the NLRB, researchers warrant that the report and any attachments do not violate the intellectual property rights of any third party and the submitter grants the NLRB a non-exclusive, royalty-free, world-wide, perpetual license to use, reproduce, create derivative works, and publish the report and any attachments.

Information 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 NLRB, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled under their coordinated vulnerability disclosure process. We will not share your name or contact information without express permission.

NLRB only accepts vulnerability reports via https://bugcrowd.com/nlrb-vdp. Reports may be submitted anonymously. If you share contact information, we will acknowledge receipt of your report within three business days.

What we would like to see from you:
In order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports:

  • Describe the location the vulnerability was discovered and the potential impact of exploitation.
  • Offer a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce the vulnerability (proof of concept scripts or screenshots are helpful).
  • Be in English, if possible.

What you can expect from us:
When you choose to share your contact information with us, we commit to coordinating with you as openly and as quickly as possible.

  • Within three business days, we will acknowledge that your report has been received.
  • 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.

We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues.
NLRB will not provide any financial incentive for disclosure of vulnerabilities and your participation in this program.

Questions

Questions regarding this policy may be sent to NLRBITSec@nlrb.gov. The NLRB encourages security researchers to contact us for clarification on any element of this policy. Please contact us prior to conducting research if you are unsure if a specific test method is inconsistent with or unaddressed by this policy. We also invite security researchers to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.