According to a new report from the Online Trust Association, customer sites like Twitter and YouTube have some of the best security systems and are the most “trusted” at keeping user information safe. But over half of government websites are open to cyber attacks, which is a bit disturbing considering the nature of the information that is often transmitted within them.
This year is the 9th time OTA has released their yearly “Online Trust Audit & Honor Roll.” For the objectives of this report, only sites that require users to create an ID are checked. The group analyzed over 1,000 customer facing websites for privacy and security measures and determined that 76% had a high acceptable grade to make the honor roll.
While there remained more “trustworthy” sites than previously, barely 39 percent of U.S. federal government websites made the share. And only 27 percent of Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. 100 bank sites. For government places, that’s actually a significant reduction from 46 percent in 2016.
The report addressed that since many people are paying more attention to security, there’s not a lot of middle areas. Websites “increasingly each take privacy and security seriously and do well in the audit and lag the industry significantly in one or more critical areas,” it addressed.
Help could be on the way, although. In 2016, President Barack Obama proposed a $19 billion cybersecurity plan to improve and replace the government’s information technology systems. That was followed by an executive order from President Trump that’s directed at protecting the USA’s infrastructure systems and government information technology systems from cyber attack risks.
