Vulnerabilities of Government Websites in a Developing Country – the Case of Burkina Faso

Abstract

Abstract. 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 government 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.

Examining the relationship between e-government development, nation’s cyber-security commitment, business usage and economic prosperity: a cross-country analysis

“…Previous studies were not able to solve this apparent anomaly by assessing the quality of e-government websites. (Zhao et al, 2010;Bissyandé et al, 2016;Ali and Zamri Murah, 2018). However, in the study conducted by Thompson et al (2020), the quality of e-government websites was studied in terms of cybersecurity across two countries (Australia and Thailand).…”

“…Furthermore, Zhao et al (2010) assessed 50 US states and found several security flaws, which would expose the IP addresses of the websites. Similarly, other countries were also evaluated, namely, Nigeria (Awoleye et al, 2012;Awoleye et al, 2014), Kyrgyz Republic (Ismailova, 2017), Jordan (Alsmadi and Shanab, 2016), Burkina Faso (Bissyandé et al, 2016) and Libya (Ali and Zamri Murah, 2018). Results from these studies recommend that policies should be in place to assist e-government services to improve authenticity, thereby gaining public and business trust.…”