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#cookies#more#don#countries#sites#gdpr#germany#government#data#why
Discussion (58 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
For example, I'd be more than happy to pentest some govt websites here in Germany, if the very act of visiting them with a non-standard browser couldn't somehow already be misconstrued as breaking various hacking laws. No thanks! Keep your security vulnerabilities.
And I do think that security research should have some regulation about it, but it should be more about responsible handling of the privileged access you gained, or a responsibility to disclose found vulnerabilities in private and/or to a government entity. You know, "If you have gained access to a system, and you saw a button <Turn off cooling pump 2> and you pressed it, you are on the hook for the damages". That is common practice with paid pentesters already.
But we're at a point where a court had do decide if discovering an endpoint on an API without authorization is a "circumvention of a security boundary" or not. Luckily, we now have a ruling that accessing API endpoints without authorization logic is no circumvention of a security boundary, due to a lack of a security boundary like authorization.
That's the level we are at. I don't want to know what happens if foreign nation state actors start acting on this seriously.
And while URL obscurity alone is weak evidence of "special protection" of a resource, I'm sure some legal team would love to try to argue otherwise.
A nice addition would be to add who is hosting their email. First handful I've looked at are all outlook.com, which seems a much bigger privacy & security risk than not using DNSSEC.
Headlines: 3.000 governmental sites use tracking cookies illegally, over 1.000 database management interfaces are publicly reachable, 99% of governmental email is poorly encrypted.
there are quite a few like this, that on close inspection, are just fine
1. Countries with strong e-government and HIGH understanding of its requirements rank LOW (good!)
2. Countries with evolving e-government practices and LOW understanding of the implications rank HIGH (bad!)
3. Countries FAR BEHIND in e-government practices rank LOW (...good?)
Goes to show that globally we need more tech-literate people on the forefront of politics, so that the proper priorities are also set in execution...
https[:]//erasmus-plus.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2026-05/mortal-kombat-2-cs.pdf
VirusTotal claims the PDF file is clean, but I don't think I'd fully trust it anyway. If you do find malicious content, could be worth submitting the URLs to VirusTotal so that the domain is flagged by browsers (eg Google SafeBrowsing) and people can't accidentally visit ec.europa.eu domains until it has been cleaned.
I have been working on similar project, focusing on lithuanian-only "goverment" sites, but it's not perfectly obvious how to recognise public vs private websites, as at least half of those are managed privatelly, used publically. (Mostly due that was cheaper and/or because lack of requirements and/or other weird situations.)
But yeah, I can confirm that stats are same-ish in Lithuanian web too. I just havent finished gathering data yet, it will take a while.
Perhaps a freedom of information request might also work, but that will take a lot of time to write correctly and does not scale across all governments.
GDPR was adopted more than a decade ago and our governments still can't do it right, yet they expect everyone else to get it right. Amazing regulation.
It has 3 HIGH RISK issues because
The thing though is that this is purely informational website (that's defunct under Safari :D) and all actual interaction goes through specialized portal (e.g. gov.pl, for which only complain is cipher order).I get it, it's aggregator but showing red maps is at leals sensationalists
Seems that results are taken from internet.nl, which has WAY better UI than page posted.
https://batch.internet.nl/site/um.warszawa.pl/17768032/#
Given the fact lots of sites like that have Wordpress 'databases' of form submissions full of people's personal data, absolutely definitely emphatically yes.
When the GDPR became active eight or so years ago, we got a few GDPR related requests to our service. Basically strongly worded requests to remove their data and account, which we of course honored. All of these came from Germany. Nobody else really cared. But it was kind of curious quickly that happened. What was interesting is that we had zero such requests before that law came into power. And it's not like we were misbehaving or would have denied such a request. This was more a matter of principle: "I now finally have the right to ask this, so I'm going to."
Germany is a big reason GDPR got so complicated and why, hopefully soon, it will be updated to not be fixated on just cookies so much. It never really was about the cookies but about data handling and sharing.
Any mobile app you install might track you without setting cookies and you can't install an ad blocker in those either. That's why Google loves apps so much. You don't actually need cookies for those. There usually is no cookie screen when you install one usually (unless it's a web app packaged up as an app). But sharing personal data with a third party provider is still problematic under GDPR. If you read the actual law, it barely mention cookies at all. The "must have consent screen for cookies" is just the common (mis)-interpretation for laymen; because it's the most visible impact that this has had on them. When it comes to date removal and other requests, it's less about features you have and more about processes you use for complying with legal requests. That can be a person answering emails and doing things manually. Doesn't scale if you get a lot of requests but it would be fine legally.
In what way is GDPR focused on cookies?
In my experience, developers in online discussions make it seem all about cookies, pretending other ways of tracking don't exist, while the law does not. But it has been a while since I looked into it and I might remember that wrong.
> There usually is no cookie screen when you install one usually (unless it's a web app packaged up as an app).
A lot of games provide opt-in screens, as they heavily rely on ad networks.
> If you read the actual law, it barely mention cookies at all
Now I am confused, didn't you just say it was focused on cookies?
Because these requests would be 100% ignored. And the law gave people the power they wanted.
I'm mentally and legally far from Germany and I'm not a big supporter of GDPR, but this law is indeed a step in the right direction.
But for real, Italian public administration digitalization isn’t as bad as people think when compared to other big countries. SPID (an electronic identity system, now deprecated) was years ahead of many other European countries (and easily, the US), and PEC (a certified email standard for official communications established in 2005, that can be used with standard email clients) is still more advanced than the often more complicated and closed systems used in many other places. The Italian standard also deeply influenced the EU standard: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3560107.3560256
It seems weird that a system would eventually settle on restricting itself to just full stops and commas, yet not settle the debate on where to put full stops and commas. Like if your system is going to converge strongly on two symbols, finish the job!