Vulnerability Disclosure Policy

Effective Date: March 17, 2022

Last Updated: May 13, 2022

Helm Labs LLC (“Helm,” “we,” “our,” or “us”) provides this vulnerability disclosure policy to give security researchers clear guidelines for conducting vulnerability discovery activities and to convey our requirements regarding how such vulnerability discoveries should be submitted to us.

This vulnerability disclosure policy also describes the systems and types of research that are covered under this policy (i.e., the scope), how to submit vulnerability reports, and how long we ask security researchers to wait before publicly disclosing vulnerabilities.

We are committed to protecting the security of the information entrusted to us and we continually work to improve the security of our products. 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 we 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 (or lack of authorization, in case of a violation of this policy) 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 encountered 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 prohibited:

Network denial of service (DoS or DDoS) tests or other tests that impair access to or damage a system or data
Physical testing such as office access, open doors, and tailgating
Social engineering such as phishing, vishing, and other non-technical vulnerability testing

Scope

Before adding a system or service to the scope, you must ensure you are permitted to authorize security testing on the system or service. For example, if you use a managed service provider or software as a service, you must confirm whether the vendor has explicitly authorized such testing, such as in your agency’s contract with the provider or their publicly available policy. If no such testing is authorized, you must work with the vendor to obtain authorization. If it is not possible to obtain the vendor’s authorization, you may not include those systems or services in scope of your policy.

This policy applies to the following systems and services:

*.organizer.com
*.civicexplorer.com
*.crowdskout.com
*.helmteam.us
*.civically.com

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, are not authorized by this policy, and should be reported directly to the vendor according to their disclosure policy (if any). If you are unsure whether a system is in scope or not, contact us at vdp@helmteam.us before starting your research.

Though we develop and maintain other internet-accessible systems or services, we require 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. The scope of this policy is subject to change without notice.

Bug Bounty

Helm does not offer a bug bounty program.

Reporting Vulnerabilities

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 Helm, 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 vdp@helmteam.us. Reports may be submitted anonymously. By submitting a vulnerability report, you acknowledge that you have no expectation of payment and that you expressly waive any future pay claims. If you share contact information, we will acknowledge receipt of your report within five business days. We do not support PGP-encrypted emails.

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 five 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 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 vdp@helmteam.us. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.