The U.S. Department of Homeland Security says its first bug bounty program, Hack DHS, has resulted in the disclosure of more than 120 vulnerabilities, and 27 of them were determined to be critical.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) launched the agency’s first bug bounty program in December 2021 in an attempt to find and report any instances of the Log4Shell bug, a critical remote code execution bug in the popular Java logger Log4j, across all public-facing information system assets.
The program was then expanded with the goal of developing a model that can be used by other organizations across every level of government to increase its own cybersecurity defenses ad resilience, the agency says.
The 122 vulnerabilities disclosed by more than 450 vetted security researchers was the first phase of the Hack DHS program, with the second of three phases allowing cybersecurity researchers and ethical hacker to participate in a live in-person hacking event. The third and final phase will include the department’s findings from the program to help inform future bug bounty programs.
Hack DHS leverages a platform created by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the DHS’s expert cybersecurity agency. The program is governed by several rules of engagement and is monitored by the DHS Office of the Chief Information Officer.
Participants must disclose their findings to DHS systems and owners and leadership, including the nature of the vulnerability and how it was exploited. However, the agency did not release any further details about the vulnerabilities disclosed.
DHS says it awarded a total of $125,6000 to participants for identifying the security bugs.
“The enthusiastic participation by the security researcher community during the first phase of Hack DHS enabled us to find and remediate critical vulnerabilities before they could be exploited,” DHS Chief Information Officer Eric Hysen said in a statement. “We look forward to further strengthening our relationship with the researcher community as Hack DHS progresses.”
The program builds on similar initiatives across the private and public sector, including the Department of Defense’s Hack the Pentagon program.
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