Vulnerability Disclosure Policy 

Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission 

January 2024 

Introduction 

The Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission is an independent adjudicative agency 

that provides administrative trial and appellate review of legal disputes arising under the Federal 

Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977 (Mine Act). 

Under the Mine Act, the Department of Labor issues regulations covering health and safety in the 

nation's mines. Federal mine inspectors employed by the Department's Mine Safety and Health 

Administration (MSHA) enforce these regulations by issuing citations and orders to mine operators. 

The Commission is concerned solely with the adjudication of disputes under the Mine Act, including 

the determination of appropriate penalties. It does not regulate mining or enforce the Mine Act. The 

Commission was established as an independent agency to ensure its impartiality. 

FMSHRC 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. 

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 FMSHRC 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. 

Guidelines 

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

• 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 persistent command line access, 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 

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 

Scope 

This policy applies to the following systems and services: 

fmshrc.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 ITsecurity@fmshrc.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 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 FMSHRC, we may share your report with the Cybersecurity 

and Infrastructure Security Agency, where it will be handled their. We will not share your name or 

contact information without express permission. 

 

We accept vulnerability reports through our bugcrowd program (https://bugcrowd.com/fcc-vdp) 

and questions can be directed to ITSecurity@fmshrc.gov. Reports may be submitted anonymously. If 

you share contact information, we will acknowledge receipt of your report within 5 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. 

• We will maintain an open dialogue to discuss issues. 

Questions 

Questions regarding this policy may be sent to ITSecurity@fmshrc.gov . We also invite you to 

contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.