A VULNERABILITY AUDIT OF THE U.S. STATE E-GOVERNMENT NETWORK SYSTEMS

Abstract

This study investigated the network vulnerability status of the e-government service portals of the 50 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. The findings indicate that most state e-government portals had their network information, such as portal’s IP address, CIDR, and network range, publicly available on the Internet through the Google search. However, the state e-government portals had their most ports filtered or behind firewalls with very few open ports— Port 80/tcp and Port 443/tcp. To further reduce the vulnerability of state e-government network systems, this paper recommended how to hide portal’s IP address and how to secure open ports.