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Vulnerabilities of Government Websites in a Developing Country – The Case of Burkina Faso
BISSYANDE, Tegawendé François D Assise; Ouoba, Jonathan; Ahmat, Daouda et al.
2015In 7th International Conference on e‐Infrastructure and e‐Services for Developing Countries
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Keywords :
e-government; web security; vulnerabilities; CMS; developing countries
Abstract :
[en] Slowly, but consistently, the digital gap between developing and developed countries is being closed. Everyday, there are initiatives towards relying on ICT to simplify the interaction between citizens and their governments in developing countries. E-government is thus becoming a reality: in Burkina Faso, all government bodies are taking part in this movement with web portals dedicated to serving the public. Unfortunately, in this rush to promote government actions within this trend of digitization, little regards is given to the security of such web sites. In many cases, government highly critical web sites are simply produced in a product line fashion using Content Management Systems which the webmasters do not quite master. We discuss in this study our findings on empirically assessing the security of govern- ment websites in Burkina Faso. By systematically scanning these websites for simple and well-known vulnerabilities, we were able to discover issues that deserved urgent attention. As an example, we were able to crawl from temporary backup files in a government web site all information (hostname, login and password in clear) to read and write directly in the database and for impersonating the administrator of the website. We also found that around 50% of the government websites are built on top of platforms suffering from 14 publicly known vulnerabilities, and thus can be readily attacked by any hacker.
Disciplines :
Computer science
Author, co-author :
BISSYANDE, Tegawendé François D Assise  ;  University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT)
Ouoba, Jonathan
Ahmat, Daouda
Ouédraogo, Fréderic
Béré, Cédric
Bikienga, Moustapha
Sere, Abdoulaye
Dandjinou, Mesmin
Sié, Oumarou
External co-authors :
yes
Language :
English
Title :
Vulnerabilities of Government Websites in a Developing Country – The Case of Burkina Faso
Publication date :
December 2015
Event name :
AFRICOMM' 2015
Event date :
from 15-12-2015 to 17-12-2015
Audience :
International
Main work title :
7th International Conference on e‐Infrastructure and e‐Services for Developing Countries
Peer reviewed :
Peer reviewed
Available on ORBilu :
since 09 February 2015

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