Vulnerability assessments: a case study of Jordanian universities
Mohammed Akour, Izzat Mahmoud Alsmadi · 2015
Websites of universities are considered the most important gateways to those Universities. They are heavily used by faculty members, employees, past, current and future students. They have a significant impact on University popularity and ranking. From a security perspective, those websites can be targets for a large number of possible security attacks such as: Flooding, denial of service (DoS), web defacement, etc. Attacks can be also from outsiders as well as insiders. In this paper, we conducted a vulnerability assessment on Websites of universities in Jordan. To ensure that our tests are constructive, we only employed passive penetration testing methods. Results showed that a significant number of those evaluated universities have critical or sever level vulnerabilities. Such vulnerabilities can be relatively easily be exploited by security attacks or attackers.