CISA Official Touts Effectiveness of Vulnerability Disclosure Policy Platform

James Sheire, chief of the cybersecurity shared services office at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, wrote in a blog post on Friday that his agency’s government-wide platform meant to receive and evaluate government organizations’ vulnerability disclosure policy submissions onboarded 40 programs and facilitated the remediation of more than 1,000 exploits by the end of 2022.

Sheire said that VDPs enable agencies to resolve software vulnerabilities before hackers can utilize them and encourage public security researchers to report such flaws. He added that such policies allow agencies to improve their vulnerability awareness and security posture while expanding researcher collaboration.

Through CISA’s VDP Platform, an agency can receive public security researcher expertise to find vulnerabilities that evade conventional scanning technology. The platform also provides government organizations with a single interface to manage their VDP and obtain vulnerability information. The platform also features report validation and triage functionality, Sheire said in the blog post CISA published Friday.

The Department of Homeland Security has used CISA’s VDP Platform to facilitate bug bounty programs, including a pilot program to uncover exploits in internal systems and a separate event focused on the Log4j vulnerability.