Vulnerability Disclosure Policy

Security is a core StatusGator value. We appreciate the input of security researchers acting in good-faith to help us maintain a high standard for the security and privacy of our users. This includes encouraging responsible vulnerability research and disclosure. The policy below sets forth our definition of good-faith in the context of finding and reporting vulnerabilities, as well as what you can expect from us in return.

Expectations

When working with us, according to this policy, you can expect us to:

  • Extend Safe Harbor for your vulnerability research that is related to this policy;
  • Work with you to understand and validate your report, including a timely initial response to the submission; and
  • Work to remediate discovered vulnerabilities in a timely manner, within our operational constraints; and
  • Strive to keep you informed about the progress of a vulnerability as it is processed.

Official Channels

Any vulnerability deemed to be in-scope, according to this policy, should be reported directly to us via email at security@statusgator.com.

Guidelines

To encourage vulnerability research and to avoid any confusion between legitimate research and malicious attack, we ask that you attempt, in good faith, to:

  • Play by the rules. Adhere to this policy and any other relevant agreements, e.g., Terms of Service;
  • Report any vulnerability you've discovered promptly;
  • Avoid violating the privacy of others, disrupting our systems, destroying data, and/or harming user experience;
  • Use only the Official Channels to discuss vulnerability information with us;
  • Handle the confidentiality of details of any discovered vulnerabilities according to our Disclosure Policy;
  • Perform testing only on in-scope systems, and respect systems and activities which are out-of-scope;
  • If a vulnerability provides unintended access to user data, such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), credit card data, or proprietary information: Cease testing and submit a report immediately;
  • Only interact with accounts you own unless given explicit permission by the account holder;
  • Do not engage in extortion.
  • Be clear and succinct—a short proof-of-concept link is invaluable;
  • Never attempt non-technical attacks—such as social engineering, phishing, or physical attacks—against our employees, users, or infrastructure; and
  • Do not view, alter, save, store, transfer, or otherwise access our data or the data of our users without explicit permission.

We may modify the terms or terminate this policy at any time.

Safe Harbor

When conducting vulnerability research according to this policy, we consider the research conducted under this policy to be:

  • Authorized in view of any applicable anti-hacking laws, and we will not initiate or support legal action against you for accidental, good-faith violations of this policy;
  • Authorized in view of relevant anti-circumvention laws, and we will not bring a claim against you for circumvention of technology controls;
  • Exempt from restrictions in our Acceptable Usage Policy that would interfere with conducting security research, and we waive those restrictions on a limited basis; and
  • Lawful, helpful to the overall security of the Internet, and conducted in good faith.

You are expected, as always, to comply with all applicable laws. If legal action is initiated by a third party against you, and you have complied with this policy, we will take steps to make it known that your actions were conducted in compliance with this policy.

If at any time you have concerns or are uncertain whether your security research is consistent with this policy, please submit a report before going any further.

In-Scope

Any design or implementation issue that substantially affects the confidentiality or integrity of user data is likely to be considered in-scope. Common examples include:

  • Cross-site scripting.
  • Cross-site request forgery.
  • Authentication or authorization flaws.
  • Server-side code execution bugs.
  • Circumvention of our permissions model.
  • SQL injection.
  • XML external entity attacks.

While this list is reflective of the research we prioritize, it should not be considered exhaustive. Any report that concerns the possible compromise of sensitive user data or our systems is of interest. By extension, this includes the reporting of serious security weaknesses in any dependency—such as open source libraries, software, or third-party components—actively used in the development of our properties and/or products shared below.

Assets in scope

The following assets are explicitly in scope of this policy.

  • Our website and application hosted at statusgator.com
  • Our hosted status page product available at [customer].statusgator.com
  • Our public status page hosted at statusgatorstatus.com

Out-of-Scope

The following issues are explicitly outside the scope of this policy:

  • Implementation or misconfiguration issues present on systems outside of our control.
  • Policies on presence/absence of SPF/DMARC records.
  • Rate-limiting attacks.
  • Issues regarding enforcement of pricing plan limits or restrictions.
  • Password, email and account policies, such as email id verification, reset link expiration, and password length or complexity.
  • Logout cross-site request forgery.
  • Attacks requiring physical access to a user's device.
  • XSS on any site other than those listed as 'in-scope'.
  • Attacks that require an exploitation tool to overlay on top of our app (e.g., clickjacking).
  • Vulnerabilities that require a potential victim to install non-standard software or otherwise take active steps to make themselves susceptible.
  • Vulnerabilities affecting users of outdated browsers or platforms.
  • Social engineering of our employees or contractors.
  • Any physical attempts against our property, data centers, or infrastructure providers.
  • Presence of autocomplete attribute on web forms.
  • Missing cookie flags on non-sensitive cookies.
  • Any access to data where the targeted user needs to be operating a rooted mobile device.

The following issues are outside the scope of our policy, unless they are accompanied by evidence of exploitability:

  • Use of a known-vulnerable library.
  • Missing best practices.
  • Insecure SSL/TLS ciphers.
  • Missing security headers, which do not directly lead to a vulnerability.
  • Lack of CSRF tokens, except when there is evidence of a sensitive user-action not protected by a token.
  • Host header injections.
  • Reports from automated tools or scans that haven't been manually validated.
  • Presence of banner or version information, unless a vulnerable version.

Known Issues

Any issues already known to us will also be considered out-of-scope, though new reports of a known issue may be accepted if the instances described were not previously observed.

Excluded Assets

The following assets are explicitly outside the scope of this policy.

  • Our support portal, support.statusgator.com, operated by a third-party.
  • Any other assets or services operated by third-parties.

Rewards

In some cases we may offer you a reward as part of this policy. This is a discretionary program and we reserve the right to cancel the rewards program; the decision whether or not to pay a reward and its amount is at our discretion. If we do offer a reward the following conditions will apply.

  • If a reward is offered it will be limited to only one bounty per vulnerability.
  • If we receive multiple reports for the same vulnerability, only the person offering the first clear report will receive a reward.
  • We maintain flexibility with our reward system, and have no explicit minimum/maximum amount; rewards are based on severity, impact, and report quality.

Code of Conduct

There are many considerations when it comes to investigating a bug. We reply to all requests. You may not hear back via email immediately upon submitting your research but it doesn't not mean that it has not been processed or considered.

Sending harassing emails or threatening notes should be avoided in order to maintain an amicable flow between us and the security research community as a whole.

Coordinated Disclosure

We are committed to patching vulnerabilities within an appropriate amount of time given the potential impact of the report. We will never publish information about you or our communications with you without your permission, likewise, please ask for permission when sharing any pertinent information regarding a report.

At the same time, we believe that disclosure in absence of a readily available patch tends to increase risk rather than reduce it, and so we ask that you refrain from sharing your report with others.

Disclosure Timeline

Researchers may only share vulnerability details with third parties after the vulnerability has been fixed and the we have provided permission to disclose or 60 days after submission, whichever comes first. If you believe there are others that should be informed of your report before the patch is available, please let us know so we can make arrangements.

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).

Hall of Fame

We would like to thank the following security researchers for reporting vulnerabilities and security issues to us.