‘Despite improvement, still many government websites without https’

The Open State Foundation has again conducted research into the use of an https connection on the home pages of government websites. Despite an increase in the number of https pages, only slightly more than half of the home pages are equipped with the technology.

The organization reports that the number of https homepages increased by twenty percent in the past quarter compared to the first measurement in December. Back then, 44 percent of the websites were using a secure connection; now that number has risen to 52 percent. The totals do differ slightly with 1816 and 1843 domains studied, respectively. Of the 961 websites with https, 90 are misconfigured, according to the Open State Foundation.

Progress has been made at various levels, for example the number of safe websites of water boards has increased from 40.9 percent to 76.1 percent. Following the introduction of the Pulse program, which includes scanning to https use, the Tax and Customs Administration has provided its pages with the technology, according to the organization. In the first scan, for example, it emerged that the homepage of the tax authorities used http.

Minister of the Interior Ronald Plasterk announced in January that the legal introduction of https will apply to all government websites. In doing so, he returned to an earlier statement, in which he considered a secure connection only necessary for websites that process sensitive data.

SIDN, among others, launched an investigation at the end of January, in which the organization examined company websites. It found that about 85 percent of corporate websites that handle sensitive data do not use https. At the end of February, the Standardization Forum issued a recommendation in which it recommended making https and hsts mandatory instead of just recommending the techniques.