A look at hidden web pages in Italian public administrations

Abstract

Preventing illegitimate modifications to web sites offering a public service is a fundamental requirement of any e-government initiative. Unfortunately, attacks to web sites resulting in the creation of fraudulent content by hackers are ubiquitous. In this work we attempted to assess the ability of Italian public administrations to be in full control of the respective web sites. We examined several thousands sites, including all local governments and universities, and found that approximately 1.5% of the analyzed sites serves contents that admittedly is not supposed to be there. Although these contents do not constitute an immediate threat to citizens, this result does not seem very encouraging also because our methodology leads to very conservative estimates. We believe that our analysis allows gaining useful insights into this novel and peculiar threat.