84% of Indian politicians' websites insecure: Study

At a time when the website of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) remained inaccessible to users for the second consecutive day on Wednesday, a new study has revealed that 84 per cent of Indian politicians' websites are insecure.

While a quarter of the politicians have their own websites in India, 83.87 per cent of them are insecure, said the study by Britain-based consumer tech review firm Comparitech.

Of the biggest parties, the Shiv Sena (89 per cent) performed the worst, while the Indian National Congress (74 per cent) performed the best.

BJP members failed to secure 84.62 per cent of their personal sites, the results showed.

For the study, Comparitech assessed the personal websites of more than 7,500 politicians in 37 countries across the globe.

Of those websites, three out of five politicians' websites lacked basic HTTPS (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure) encryption.

Security experts agree that any website asking for user input should be secured with HTTPS. Even websites that do not include form input fields should ideally use HTTPS to encrypt the contents of what users see on a particular site.

HTTPS encrypts data in transit so that unauthorised third parties cannot intercept and decipher it.

The researchers found that politicians in developing countries are more likely to have personal websites without HTTPS (74.98 per cent) versus those in developed countries (64.46 per cent).

In the US, 26.22 per cent of the politicians' websites were not secure as against 30.65 per cent of politicians' websites in Britain which were found insecure.

At over 92 per cent, South Korea emerged as the country with the highest percentage of politician's websites that were not secure.

South Korea was followed by Poland (91.16 per cent), Hungary (90.91 per cent), Canada (86.25 per cent) and Malta (86.21 per cent) among others.

--IANS

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