Technological assessment of e-government web presence in Nigeria
Michael Awoleye, Blessing Ojuloge, Willie Owolabi Siyanbola · 2012
Government bringing innovation into its activities is a good gesture but innovation that constitutes peril due to inadequate technical capability necessitates re-assessment, hence this investigation. This study investigated susceptibility of some chosen government websites to infiltration due to flaws in the design of their websites. Sixty four websites of some organizations were randomly selected using an advanced feature of google to sieve organization's websites that have adopted the use of country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) i.e. the ".gov.ng". The research was based on some major measuring parameters which are: Cross Site Scripting (XSS), Structured Query Language injection (SQLi), Cookie manipulation (CM), unencrypted password (UP) and broken links (BL). The sixty four (64) government websites chosen span 8 categories of sectors with a view to evaluating their immunity against cyber attacks. It was found that 27 (42.2%) of the websites are vulnerable to XSS, while 20 (31.3%) to SQLi. Also, 24 websites which represents 37.5% of the websites examined are having the password inputted by the user unencrypted while a high percentage (70.3) have informational issues, like broken links which in itself may not constitute high vulnerability but could create susceptible platform which could permit infiltration. Thereafter, some appropriate policy directions which provide technical advice as to protect government resources available through the Internet were advanced. This tends to also increase citizens' confidence on the adoption of the government web-presence initiative.