[BreachExchange] Shock report: 92 per cent of US government websites totally suck

[Audrey McNeil]

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/08/most_us_government_websites_suck/

A new report into nearly 300 websites run by the US government has reached
an unsurprising conclusion: they suck.

What may be startling, however, is just how much they suck. According to
the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a dramatic 92
per cent of the websites they reviewed had a significant flaw or failing –
whether in terms of security, accessibility or speed.

One of the authors, researcher Alan McQuinn, noted that many of the
websites – 297 chosen because they were in the top one million
most-accessed websites as defined by Alexa – don't even meet the US
government's own requirements which are themselves some ways behind typical
corporate best practices.

"Considering that many constituents rely on federal websites to interact
with government, it is incumbent upon the new administration, supported by
Congress, to make websites more convenient, accessible, and secure," he
argued.

The biggest problem in terms of the average user is that the US government
is far behind on making websites accessible by phone – a trend that was
first flagged ten years ago and became a priority for pretty much every
company five years ago.

Due the rise of smart phones, an enormous number of people are using mobile
phone browsers as their main source of online information. Every website
admin in the country has spent a significant amount of time optimizing
their site to work better for phones but government, as ever, is sluggish.

Just 36 per cent of the websites reviewed passed a speed test for mobile
devices, most often because there was no image compression or page-load
prioritization – ie, they hadn't done any real optimization work.

And only 41 per cent of websites were mobile friendly, with the majority
throwing out huge fonts or tiny links or buttons. In other words, no one
has been tasked with bringing the website up to date in the past five years.

(In case you're interested, the speed tests were done using Google's
PageSpeed testing tool which rates sites on 12 metrics and gives them a
score of between 0 and 100. Any sites that scored under 54 for desktop
sites or 56 for mobile sites was deemed to have failed by ITIF.)

Security

To be fair, the researchers were quite impressed with the overall security
efforts in place. A pretty decent 86 per cent of websites had SSL in place
and 90 per cent used DNSSEC. So clearly someone has been doing a solid job
in the background. However, 19 per cent of those with SSL had implemented
it poorly and so it wasn't providing the security it was supposed to.

It does make you wonder about the 14 per cent of sites without HTTPS and
why 10 per cent haven't put DNSSEC in place (we have the answer below). It
is worth noting that these 297 websites are the most popular of the roughly
6,000 websites hosted on 400 domains, so they should be the best of the
best.

In terms of the biggest overall failing: unsurprisingly, accessibility
issues were top of the list with 42 per cent of website failing in terms of
making it easy for people with disabilities to use. The biggest issues are
poor contrast and a lack of decent labeling and tagging, which makes
navigating a website much harder.

As to why the poor showing and wide disparity, it's because of the nature
of government.

The high security ratings are down to a very simple reality: they were
mandated. In 2008, the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
said it required all federal websites to introduce DNSSEC (M08-23). And in
2015, the Obama Administration did the same for HTTPS/SSL (M15-13).

Both these orders were also tracked – the annual Federal Information
Security Management Act (FISMA), for example, requires an annual report on
the federal government and its IT security metrics to be produced and
published. Guess what the DNSSEC target was? Equal to or greater than 90
per cent of websites. And the ITIF's findings? 90 per cent exactly – would
you believe it?

As for the SSL requirement: it looks as though FISMA has lumped that in
with other website defenses and given it a 90 per cent target rate.
Although the executive order only gave December 31, 2016, ie, three months
ago as the target date, so 86 per cent ain't bad.

Recommendations

All of which leads ITIF report researchers to make some recommendations
about how the situation can be improved.

All of them comprise the White House acting or putting out new
requirements, and they are:

A series of website modernization "sprints" to fix known problems – a
government hackathon in other words, although presumably that is not a word
that will go down well in federal circles.
A federal mandate to meet page load speed requirements.
A requirement for websites to monitor and share website analytics – there
is a Digital Analytics Program just for this sort of thing, but only 52 per
cent of departments are currently using it.
A "website consolidation initiative" run by the OMB – not a bad idea since
the White House could paint it as saving money and simplifying its
citizens' lives.
Get Congress to "encourage" non-executive agencies and other branches of
government to adopt federal standards – it should happen but it won't
because, Congress.
A new capital fund for federal agencies to upgrade their IT – possibly as
part of an infrastructure bill, President Trump?

All of which sounds like a solid pragmatic approach to what is a dull but
important issue.

But to add some spice, here are the worst and the best federal websites.
First the top five:

healthdata.gov
healthfinder.gov
consumerfinance.gov
whitehouse.gov (Trump administration)
usembassy.gov

It's worth noting that the top two are almost certainly thanks to the team
of outside tech experts that President Obama brought in to fix the
disastrous launch of Obamacare's online portal in 2013.

It's also worth noting that the Obama Administration's White House website
came 55th in the list, where Trump's is 4th. Although there is almost
nothing on the Trump website yet and it was a completely fresh install, so
there hasn't been time to screw things up.

And the worst? The absolute pits? The devil-children of the federal
government's online efforts?

usphs.gov – the federal government's doctors.
fmc.gov – the government's sea-based import/export arm.
osti.gov – rather embarrassingly, the research and development arm of the
Department of Energy.
trade.gov – the trade administration, something that presumably Trump will
be all over given his tendency to focus on the "great deals" he will cut
with other countries.
ipcc-wg2.gov – a website so bad it is currently down. Why? Well, don't
panic, but it is for a critical working group looking at climate change.
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