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Ankit Vijay
Ankit Vijay

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Add security.txt to your website

Recently, I came across below tweet from security expert Troy Hunt

Google now has a security.txt file – so should you! https://t.co/fXmeNG9Yem https://t.co/drbJQ1Ynw8

— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) February 3, 2018

The tweet talked about a file named security.txt. I went on reading his post to understand what exactly is security.txt and what problem does it solves.

So, what is Security.txt

No organization wants to be caught on a wrong foot when it comes to security. A data or security breach could lead to financial and reputation loss of a company. When a security researcher finds a potential breach or security vulnerability in an organization website/ application, he/she tries to contact the organization to “responsibly disclose” the issue. The disclosure is confidential in nature and allows the organization time to take appropriate action against the issue.

But, who does the security researcher reach out to? Usually, in scenarios like this, they would not prefer to reach out to the organization via a general “contact us” page on the website or emailing/ calling a customer care of the organization. They would rather like to reach out to someone in the organization who can take immediate action, someone with authority.

That’s where security.txt can come to rescue. The concept of security.txt was proposed by security researcher *Ed Foudil. * According to his website, securitytxt.org:

The main purpose of security.txt is to help make things easier for companies and security researchers when trying to secure platforms. Thanks to security.txt, security researchers can easily get in touch with companies about security issues.

The organizations can add security.txt to their website to provide information of how or who security researchers can reach out to when they come across a security vulnerability on their website.

The website also provides an easy way to generate the security.txt file. The file needs to be added to the path /.well-known/security.txt.

Many websites including Google have started adding security.txt, maybe its time you should add one too 🙂

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