The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday approved a bipartisan bill that would incentivize ethical hackers to hunt for vulnerabilities in the State Department’s digital systems.
The legislation would direct the department to set up a pilot “bug bounty” program to pay security researchers for discovering and reporting vulnerabilities in the department’s public internet-facing systems.
The bill and others like it represent a growing effort in Washington to address weaknesses in the federal government’s digital systems and better guard against evolving threats from nation-state and criminal hackers.
