Deep Dive: U.S. Federal Government’s Security and Privacy Practices
In April 2019, the Internet Society’s Online Trust Alliance released its 10th Annual Online Trust Audit & Honor Roll. The Audit looks at the security and privacy practices of over 1,000 of the top sites on the Internet, from retailers to government sites. In this post we will take a deeper dive into the U.S. Federal Government sector of the Audit. The Government sector is defined as the top 100 sites in the U.S. Federal Government by traffic (based on Alexa ranking). Given the nature of the U.S. Government compared to companies, this sample has some unique properties, namely site security.
The most obvious place the government excels is in the area of encryption. The reason for this is largely due to a mandate from the Homeland Security Department that all U.S. Government sites be encrypted, but the standard should still be the same for any site. Put another way, the other sectors in the Audit do not have an excuse for lagging in security.
In site security the Government sector fared the best with 100% adoption of “Always-On Secure Socket Layer” (AOSSL) and/or “HTTP Strict Transport Security” (HSTS), compared to 91% of sites overall. The Continue reading
