Independent security researchers play a valuable role in internet security. As a result, Pentest List encourages responsible reporting of any vulnerabilities found in our platform and are committed to ensuring the security of our userbase 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.
2 Authorization
As a security researcher, if you make a good faith effort to comply with this policy during your security research activities, we will consider your research to be authorized and we will work with you to understand and resolve the issue quickly. Pentest List will not pursue legal action related to your research.
3 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 publicly disclose this data.
4 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.
5 Scope
This policy applies to the following systems and services:
pentestlist.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 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 [email protected] before starting your research.
Though we may 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.
6 Reporting a vulnerability
We accept vulnerability reports via [email protected]. Reports may be submitted anonymously. If you share contact information, we will acknowledge receipt of your report within 3 business days.
7 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.
8 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.
9 Do NOT report
The following issues are considered out of scope and should not be reported:
Issues that resolve to third-party services
"Self" XSS & "Self" exploitation
Missing Security Best Practices
Clickjacking/UI Redressing
Use of known-vulnerable library (without proof of exploitability)
Software Version Disclosure
Intentional Open Redirects
Missing cookie flags
SSL/TLS Best Practices
Incomplete/Missing SPF/DKIM
Physical & Social Engineering attacks
Results of automated scanners
Login/Logout/Unauthenticated CSRF
Autocomplete attribute on web forms
Issues related to networking protocols
Verbose error pages (without proof of exploitability)
Denial of Service attacks
Missing Security HTTP Headers (without proof of exploitability)
Issues that require unlikely user interaction
Disclosure of information that does not present a significant risk