Might this be because any kind of genuine pentesting, unless it's explicitly been paid for, is highly illegal in countries like Germany (§ 202c StGB, § 202a StGB, etc.)?
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.
In Germany we have the completely wrong mindset for such things. Instead of being grateful, all we care about is "whose fault is it" and CYA tactics. And no one wants to be "guilty" or have their incompetence revealed, so suits will do anything they can to avoid that. Somethings serious needs to go wrong first, so that loss of face already happens, before anyone will move. Maybe we need to get hacked by Russia a few more times.
To be fair, most of this stuff could be found with any normal browser. You don't even need browser dev tools. But if you write a simple script to automate any of this... yeah. They can totally get you for doing that.
Visiting an admin page is fine, yeah, but even just trying a default password, or having specific cookies set in the browser that look like an attempt to gain access, already clearly violate § 202a and you could be prosecuted, from how I read that law's text.
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.
Today we launch SecurityBaseline: monitoring 67.000 governments and 200.000 sites.
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.
Great work.
It's fun how these graphs indirectly hint at a cross-section of "e-Gov"/"tech-literacy in politics" per country with those incident-tables.
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...
Is there a list of these "goverment" sites anywhere?
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.
What we have is published on https://securitybaseline.eu/datasets openly. Some governments publish lists, and they will be incomplete. In the article we point to our most successful approach: sifting through the (partial) zone file with domain owner information. That delivered thousands of sites the Dutch government didn't even know about.
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.
That's a wonderful initiative! I wanted first to complain about Dutch municipalities but looking at the foundation, I see fellow dutch- and belgian-men are already focusing on them!
To be fair it's pretty much the norm with shared and even vps hosting that your cpanel etc will be publicly accessible. Only people who hand-roll their setups will have things firewalled down etc. And if it's a website promoting a local tree planting initiative or whatever is it really a good use of budget to get everything hardened so much.
And if it's a website promoting a local tree planting initiative or whatever is it really a good use of budget to get everything hardened so much.
Given the fact lots of sites like that have Wordpress 'databases' of form submissions full of people's personal data, absolutely definitely emphatically yes.
Might be worth enclosing that URL in quotes or using [dot] in the URL instead, so people don't accidentally click on that "mortal-kombat-2-cs.pdf" file that Europa.EU is hosting.
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.
Interesting data set. Would be interesting to repeat the same for SMEs. In my experience, Germany is pretty hopelessly behind on everything except GDPR enforcement. They are kings of that. Must have a cookie screen, apparently. That's why they score so good on that and not much else.
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.
> 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.
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?
Honestly surprised that Italian municipalities are doing relatively well compared to other countries. Maybe it helped a push from the government to have a shared design for municipal websites (https://github.com/orgs/italia/repositories?q=comuni)
The thing with government stuff is that no one is held accountable. Even people “fired” from doing a lousy job in a place will just be transfered to another department or another government agency. No one really gets fired fired. And when you know nothing happens to your job… there is no incentive to be good at it.
It's what you get, when you scrape the bottom of the barrel with the salaries you are willing to pay. Are you willing to take a 1/3 pay cut for no good reason? You are welcome to work in such positions.
Knowing the govt sector, the developers probably got hired 20 years ago and enjoy their stable, chill, even if a bit low pay job. No need to do CV-Driven Development and chase any new trend if the site's running and they're not looking for a new position...
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 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.
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...
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.
Given the fact lots of sites like that have Wordpress 'databases' of form submissions full of people's personal data, absolutely definitely emphatically yes.
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.
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.
The thing with government stuff is that no one is held accountable. Even people “fired” from doing a lousy job in a place will just be transfered to another department or another government agency. No one really gets fired fired. And when you know nothing happens to your job… there is no incentive to be good at it.
Why is phpMyAdmin even still needed/wanted in 2026? It's not exactly user friendly for a developer, let alone an average Gov employee...
(I have been working with PHP for 20 years)