We’re From the Government and We’re Here to Let Your Information Get Hacked

All software has bugs. But some software has more bugs than others.

And some organizations are better at finding and fixing those bugs.

Just not those in the public sector.

Veracode, the code scanning tool/defect finding tool vendor scans a lot of apps a lot of times. Here is a bit of data that should scare you.

Veracode looked a twenty million scans of a half million apps and while what they discovered doesn’t surprise me, it does scare me a bit.

Their research says that the public sector has the highest percentage of applications with security flaws.

82% of the public sector applications scanned had security flaws.

On top of that, it takes the public sector twice as long to fix flaws once they are detected.

They also said that 60% of the flaws in third-party libraries that are used by public sector apps remain vulnerable after two years. That is double that of other sectors and is slower than the average by 15 months.

Last but not least, they only fix about 20% of bugs -ever.

Given that most of us do not have a choice to use or not use government apps, these statistics are alarming.

Given the government’s lack of IT resources, it is highly unlikely that things will get better any time soon.

Sorry, I don’t have a happy ending. Credit: Helpnet Security

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