Security Assessment of Libyan Government Websites

Many governments organizations in Libya have started transferring traditional government services to e-government. These e-services will benefit a wide range of public. However, deployment of e-government bring many new security issues. Attackers would take advantages of vulnerabilities in these e-services and would conduct cyber attacks that would result in data loss, services interruptions, privacy loss, financial loss, and other significant loss. The number of vulnerabilities in e-services have increase due to the complexity of the e-services system, a lack of secure programming practices, miss-configuration of systems and web applications vulnerabilities, or not staying up-to-date with security patches. Unfortunately, there is a lack of study being done to assess the current security level of Libyan government websites. Therefore, this study aims to assess the current security of 16 Libyan government websites using penetration testing framework. In this assessment, no exploits were committed or tried on the websites. In penetration testing framework (pen test), there are four main phases: Reconnaissance, Scanning, Enumeration, Vulnerability Assessment and, SSL encryption evaluation. The aim of a security assessment is to discover vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers. We also conducted a Content Analysis phase for all websites. In this phase, we searched for security and privacy policies implementation information on the government websites. The aim is to determine whether the websites are aware of current accepted standard for security and privacy. From our security assessment results of 16 Libyan government websites, we compared the websites based on the number of vulnerabilities found and the level of security policies. We only found 9 websites with high and medium vulnerabilities. Many of these vulnerabilities are due to outdated software and systems, miss-configuration of systems and not applying the latest security patches. These vulnerabilities could be used by cyber hackers to attack the systems and caused damages to the systems. Also, we found 5 websites didn't implement any SSL encryption for data transactions. Lastly, only 2 websites have published security and privacy policies on their websites. This seems to indicate that these websites were not concerned with current standard in security and privacy. Finally, we classify the 16 websites into 4 safety categories: highly unsafe, unsafe, somewhat unsafe and safe. We found only 1 website with a highly unsafe ranking. Based on our finding, we concluded that the security level of the Libyan government websites are adequate, but can be further improved. However, immediate actions need to be taken to mitigate possible cyber attacks by fixing the vulnerabilities and implementing SSL encryption. Also, the websites need to publish their security and privacy policy so the users could trust their websites.