Web Assessment of Libyan Government e-Government Services

Abstract

Libya has started transferring traditional government services into e-government services. The e-government initiative involves the use of websites to offer various services such as civil registration, financial transaction and private information handling. Currently, there has not been many studies about the security assessment of the Libyan government websites. Therefore, in this paper, we did a web security assessment of 16 Libyan government websites. The main purpose of this study is to determine the security level of these websites. The web security assessment was done in four phases: Reconnaissance, Enumeration and Scanning, Vulnerability assessment (web vulnerabilities and SSL encryption evaluation) and Content Analysis(security and privacy policies). The results showed that 9 websites have high and medium level vulnerabilities. Only 3 websites have A SSL rating. Also, only 3 websites have published security and privacy policies. We found 1 highly unsafe website, 6 unsafe websites, 8 somewhat safe websites and, 1 safe website. Overall, the study indicated the Libyan government websites are adequately secured without major security issues. Since these Libyan government websites deal with sensitive data, adequate security measures should be implemented to reduce the vulnerabilities and to mitigate future cyber security attacks.

E-government and digital transformation in Libyan local authorities

“…Recent research on e-government in Libya has included studies of security aspects (Murah and Ali, 2018), future plans (Busoud and Živković, 2016), as well as the initial development of the TOP maturity model (Forti and Wynn, 2017;Forti, 2020). However, there has been no research that attempts to address the current situation regarding e-government in Libya in the context of digital transformation.…”

Global e-government development: besides the relative wealth of countries, do policies matter?

“…Corroborating this, examples of the previously mentioned inhibiting factors have been mentioned as constraining e-government development in some of the fragile states under analysis: "Low populations, large disparities in income and access to on-line services of any sort and low educational levels" in the case of Djibouti (Dolan, 2014); unstable "civil and political conditions" (Abd et al, 2019) and "resistance of some official and nonofficial organizations, groups, and individuals", "delay voting on e-government project that has been submitted to parliament" and "less concern or support shown by politicians and high level government" (Salman, 2019), in the case of Iraq; "technical, infrastructure, cultural and social barriers" (Ahmed et al, 2013) and "lack of studies and researches", "low trust" and "security and privacy concerns" (Murah, and Ali, 2018), in the case of Libya; and cultural and educational factors, income level, lack of trust and "insufficient number of computers and lack of training packages for employees", in the case of Sudan (Elamin and Abushama, 2016).…”