Impactive works with 3rd party firms to conduct ongoing security audits and bug bounty programs, in which professional cybersecurity researchers and white-hat hackers attempt to find cyber security vulnerabilities in Impactive’s system as part of a statement of work or for monetary reward. These programs allow Impactive to stay on top of its security best practices on an ongoing basis and patch issues as they arise.
We also realize there are many technologists who are interested in helping us protect elections and advocacy work that might not be part of our official cybersecurity programming. Even if you are not part of this program, if you are aware of any potential vulnerabilities on the Impactive platform, you can still share those findings with us and by following our responsible disclosure policy you will be immediately eligible for a monetary reward based on the severity and scope of your finding.
To report a suspected vulnerability simply follow the steps listed below.
Last Updated: September 17th, 2020
Impactive is committed to ensuring the security of its users and clients 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.
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 Impactive 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.
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 command line access and/or persistence, or use the exploit to pivot to other systems.
- Provide us at least 6 months 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.
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
This policy applies to the following systems and services:
- *.outvote.io
- outvote.io
- *.impactive.io
- impactive.io
Any other subdomains of Impactive and all customer applications are excluded from this policy.
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 security@impactive.io 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.
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 Impactive, 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 at security@impactive.io. Reports may be submitted anonymously. If you share contact information, we will acknowledge receipt of your report within 3 business days.
We do not support PGP-encrypted emails.
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.
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 regarding this policy may be sent to security@impactive.io. We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.
Impactive works with 3rd party firms to conduct ongoing security audits of our platform. One part of those security audits is a bug bounty program in which professional cybersecurity researchers and white-hat hackers attempt to find cyber security vulnerabilities in Impactive's system as part of a statement of work or for monetary reward. These programs allow Impactive to stay on top of its security best practices on an ongoing basis and patch issues as they arise.
Every year, we report notable findings from these programs as part of our commitment to transparency on data privacy and security and as reflected in our responsible disclosure policy.
In 2020, some of the vulnerabilities found and patched include:
- Ability to message other users at random by iterating through user IDs.
- Ability to iterate through users at random to scrape their account team name, location, and email if listed.
- Ability to inflate team points through fake automatically generated activism by abusing certain API endpoints.
- Token exploitation vulnerability when using a beta feature due to a weak hashing algorithm based on user ID.
- Rainbow attack vulnerability due to use of a weak hashing algorithm based on user email.
Whenever a vulnerability is found, we conduct an exhaustive analysis of our server and access logs to ensure no malicious actors have previously attempted to exploit this vulnerabilities.
All the above vulnerabilities were patched within days and sometimes even hours of being reported.
We are happy to report in 2020, although there were a handful of malicious hack attempts that were limited in scope and successfully blocked, there were no major incidents or data breaches we are aware of at this time.
If you have any questions regarding these disclosures or about our larger approach to security, please contact security@impactive.io.