Introduction:

Morningstar is committed to ensuring the security of the public 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.

Authorization:

• Morningstar considers access to its systems necessary to your security research to be “authorized” access under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
• Morningstar agrees not to pursue a civil action or initiate a complaint to law enforcement for accidental, good faith violations of this policy.

• Morningstar will waive any DMCA claim against you for circumventing technological measures we have used to protect Morningstar's applications and services in scope of the policy.
• Morningstar waives any restrictions in our applicable Terms of Service that would prohibit authorized security research in compliance with Morningstar Vulnerability Program, for the limited purpose of your security research under this policy.

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 Morningstar 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.

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 disclose this data to anyone else.

Test Methods:

The following test methods are not authorized

• Denial of service, spam, or phishing attacks are considered abusive and out of scope.
• Do not exfiltrate Morningstar customer or employee data under any circumstance. Please contact us immediately if you think this is possible, or you have done so inadvertently. We will work with you to assess the full impact of the vulnerability and award appropriately.
• Physical testing (e.g. office access, open doors, tailgating), social engineering (e.g. phishing, vishing), or any other non-technical vulnerability testing.

Scope:

What's out of scope?

• Denial of service attacks
• Lack of rate limiting
• Issues related to SPF
• Brute Forcing Attacks
• CORS or crossdomain.xml issues on morningstar.com without proof-of-concept

• Any 0-day vulnerabilities or CVEs published within the last 90 days

Reporting a vulnerability:

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 Morningstar, 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@morningstar.com Reports may be submitted anonymously. If you share contact information, we will acknowledge receipt of your report within 3 business days.

What we would like to see from you:

In order to help us triage and prioritize submissions, we recommend that your reports include:

• Issue:
• Severity:
• Host / Vulnerable application:
• Vulnerable Path / URL:
• Vulnerable Parameters:
• Issue Details:

• Steps to reproduce:
• http Request and response:
• Payload used:
• Video POC (if appropriate):
• If application requires login to exploit the issue, then please share account details which is used during exploitation.

• Data extracted or disclosed post exploitation:
• Recommendations:

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.

Questions:

Questions regarding this policy may be sent to security@morningstar.com We also invite you to contact us with suggestions for improving this policy.