Vulnerabilities Assessment of Emerging Web-based Services in Developing Countries

To cope up with the pace of digitalization all over the world, like developed countries, developing countries are also offering services to its citizens through various online portals, web applications and web sites. Unfortunately, due to the lack of consideration on vulnerability issues during the development phase, many of those web based services are suffering from serious security threats. For these developing countries, vulnerability statistics are required to have insight about the current security status of the provided web services. That statistical data can assist the stakeholders to take appropriate actions against cyberattacks. In this work, we conduct a survey to observe the responses of web based services against four most commonly found web attacks called Man in the Middle, SQL Injection, Cross Site Scripting and Denial of Service. We carry out the survey for 30 websites (applications) of Bangladesh as the country has been focusing on digitalization of government services for the last few years and has already been offering various online services to its citizens. Among the 30 websites of several categories, result shows that approximately 77% sites are vulnerable to Man in the Middle attack whereas 3% are vulnerable to SQL Injection and Cross Site Scripting.