Vulnerability Disclosure Policy

Report any vulnerabilities to FMC systems 

to security@FMC.gov.

Introduction 

The Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) is committed to ensuring the 

security of the 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. 

 

This 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.

 

We encourage you to contact us to report potential vulnerabilities in our 

systems. 

Authorization 

If 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 FMC 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.

 

FEDERAL MARITIME COMMISSION

800 North Capitol Street, N.W.

Washington, D.C. 20573-0001

 
Guidelines

Under this policy, “research” means activities in which you test the security of 

the FMC’s systems in order to qualify as authorized research, you must:

• Notify us as soon as possible after you discover a real or potential 

security 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, (up to 5 business days) to 

resolve the issue before you disclose it publicly.

• Do not submit a high volume of low-quality reports.

Once you have 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

The following test methods are not authorized:

• Network denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair 

access to or damage a system or data

• Physical testing (e.g. office access, open doors, tailgating), social 

engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical 

vulnerability testing

• Full red-team penetration testing that involves unauthorized access to 

our servers

Scope

This policy applies to the following systems and services:

• *.fmc.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 security@fmc.gov before starting your research (or at the

security contact for the system’s domain name listed in the .gov WHOIS).

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 will increase the scope of this policy over time.

Reporting a vulnerability

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 FMC, 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.

We accept vulnerability reports via security@fmc.gov. Reports may be 

submitted anonymously. If you share contact information, we will acknowledge 

receipt of your report within 3 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 3 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.

• FMC does not provide payment to reporters for submitting 

vulnerabilities.

o Reporters submitting vulnerabilities to FMC, in so doing, waive 

any claims to compensation.

Questions

Questions regarding this policy may be sent to security@fmc.gov. We also 

invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.

Document Change History

Version Date Description

1.0 2/26/2021 First Issuance