The websites of more than one in four Belgian municipal administrations and local police zones are poorly secured, a survey carried out by the consulting firm BDO showed.
The survey evaluated more than 15,000 sites according to different criteria, and found that more than one in five Belgian websites were poorly secured, with local government sites being the most vulnerable. BDO found that many sites were using obsolete technology.
"Some sites do not use the HTTPS protocol. That means they don't use encryption," said Thomas Cornelis, who is a Risk Advisory at BDO.
"In concrete terms, if you log on to a site that is not very secure using your main e-mail address and your usual password, hackers who have penetrated the network can obtain these identifiers. They can then try sniffing, a practice that consists of assuming that the Internet user uses the same all-purpose password and trying to connect to his or her e-mail address. Once you access the e-mails, you have access to almost everything".
Another sector pinned by BDO is healthcare, where one out of five websites is said to be too insecure.
The Brussels Times
