About our vulnerability disclosure policy

A vulnerability is a technical issue with a Invest Northern Ireland website which attackers or hackers could use to exploit the website and its users.

Vulnerabilities are covered by this policy if the security.txt file for the domain points to this page.

You will not be paid a reward for reporting a vulnerability (known as a ‘bug bounty’).

Vulnerability reporting guidelines

Please do not share the vulnerability information beyond the owner and us, without express consent from the owner.

Vulnerabilities reported to the HackerOne platform can be submitted without the need to create a HackerOne account. However, if you wish to be updated you should create an account.

To submit your report, you will need to agree to the HackerOne Terms and Conditions and acknowledge that you have read their Privacy Policy and Disclosure Guidelines.

Once you have submitted the report, its validity will be assessed within five working days.

If you believe you have found a security vulnerability, please submit your report to us using one of the following links:

Reporting

In your report please include details of:

The website, IP or page where the vulnerability can be observed. A brief description of the type of vulnerability, for example; “XSS vulnerability”.

Steps to reproduce. These should be a benign, non-destructive, proof of concept. This helps to ensure that the report can be triaged quickly and accurately. It also reduces the likelihood of duplicate reports, or malicious exploitation of some vulnerabilities, such as sub-domain takeovers.

Please include screenshots where possible.

What to expect

After you have submitted your report, we will respond to your report within 5 working days and aim to triage your report within 10 working days. We’ll also aim to keep you informed of our progress.

Priority for remediation is assessed by looking at the impact, severity and exploit complexity. Vulnerability reports might take some time to triage or address. You are welcome to enquire on the status but should avoid doing so more than once every 14 days. This allows our teams to focus on the remediation.

We will notify you when the reported vulnerability is remediated, and you may be invited to confirm that the solution covers the vulnerability adequately.

Once your vulnerability has been resolved, we welcome requests to disclose your report. We’d like to unify guidance to affected users, so please do continue to coordinate public release with us.

Guidance

You must not:

Break any applicable law or regulations. *Access unnecessary, excessive or significant amounts of data.

Modify data in the Organisation's systems or services.

Use high-intensity invasive or destructive scanning tools to find vulnerabilities.

Attempt or report any form of denial of service, e.g. overwhelming a service with a high volume of requests.

Disrupt the Organisation's services or systems.

Submit reports detailing non-exploitable vulnerabilities, or reports indicating that the services do not fully align with “best practice”, for example missing security headers. Submit reports detailing TLS configuration weaknesses, for example “weak” cipher suite support or the presence of TLS1.0 support.

Communicate any vulnerabilities or associated details other than by means described in the published security.txt.

Social engineer, ‘phish’ or physically attack the Organisation's staff or infrastructure.

Demand financial compensation in order to disclose any vulnerabilities.

You must:

Always comply with data protection rules and must not violate the privacy of the Organisation’s users, staff, contractors, services or systems. You must not, for example, share, redistribute or fail to properly secure data retrieved from the systems or services.

Securely delete all data retrieved during your research as soon as it is no longer required or within 1 month of the vulnerability being resolved, whichever occurs first (or as otherwise required by data protection law).

Legalities

This policy is designed to be compatible with common vulnerability disclosure good practice. It does not give you permission to act in any manner that is inconsistent with the law, or which might cause the Organisation or partner organisations to be in breach of any legal obligations.

However, if legal action is initiated by a third party against you and you have complied with this policy, we can take steps to make it known that your actions were conducted in compliance with this policy.