Security Issues on Libya’s E-Government

The world’s governance and all the sectors are becoming dependent on technology with the intention of moving from the traditional form of governance and service provision towards e-governance. Technological innovations have enabled effective and efficient modes of governments to deliver or provide services and information to different categories of receivers for instance, the citizens, businesses and other governments. The move to adopt the efficient high quality and cost effective governance in the world has become a necessity with the increasing population and economic constraints that have affected the world in recent times.

Libyan government is not exception as it is in the process of recovering its economic ground following the revolutions that led to the killing of their former leader Gadhafi and the 2014 Tripoli control by the rebellious Militia. The government has invested heavily on adopting the new trend of e-governance as past studies prove that ICT implementation would enable better service provisions and policymaking (Singh, & Karaulia, 2011). The embracement of e-governance of Libyan government just as any other Arab country in the hope of developing and function at the highest level has been affected by security concerns brought about by cyber-attacks as the system is dependent on ICT. This issue has also affected many Arab countries due to limited research on various e-government aspects in Arab countries, lack of online tasks by the employees and inadequate security information.

In the exception of Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, most of the Arab countries are still in the early stages of e-governance with Libya Included thus they have begun using government web applications. The implementation of such websites have been faced with serious security concerns for instance, the hacking of the Libyan Prime Minister’s website by an Algerian hacker. The cultural and religious factors that tend to be limiting factors on embracement of new technology and the citizens’ access to information are current diluting with the new crop of citizens willing to enhance democracy but for a population comprising of about 96% of Muslims as Libya, security venerability and the rapid changes of their social, cultural and religious beliefs forces the government to mitigate the weak systems to ensure success of e-governance (Brownlee, Masoud, & Reynolds, 2015). Effective strategy to enable stronger and more secure Web applications is dependent on understanding the several vulnerabilities of the current websites. The paper thus analyzes the different levels of scope and vulnerabilities of Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL injection vulnerabilities used in Libya’s e-government Web applications. The paper intends to analyze three government websites as shown below

Since Libya boasts of having one of the highest literacy rate among its citizens and with more than double increment on the students in Libyan high education, and the low population based on the large area they occupy, the country would benefit significantly to effective e-governance implementation but researches and tests on the above websites portrays the government is wrong in its strategy (Brownlee, Masoud, & Reynolds, 2015). Security deficiencies have limited Libya’s chances of successful implementation of a transformational and warranted move to focus on e-governance. The use of static algorithm among other frameworks and tactics to detect the vulnerability on PHP scripting language that is used in building server-side web apps were used to identify the security concerns of the government websites. A study that focused on testing the vulnerabilities of the websites used web security scanners to look for a wide variety of weaknesses of the websites. They used N-Stalker web application Security Scanner, A Cunetix web vulnerability scanner (WVS) which is an evaluation tool used to audit web applications by checking for exploitable hacking weaknesses for instance, high-risk SQL injection and XSS (Shi, Chen, & Yu, 2010). The research also used Nessus Vulnerability Scanner which is fast in configuration auditing, sensible data discovery and vulnerability analysis of the security by giving a summary and description on the reasons the site is vulnerable and also gives solutions on the problems. 

Following the tests, the following results were confirmed

In the respective order of the websites in the above table, N-Stalker confirmed the number of high severity risks of the sites as 16, 8, 6 as high, 5,4,8 as moderate and 0,10,11 as low in the respective order. According to WVS, the high, moderate and low number of severity under each website were 22,11,1 for the Prime Minister’s office. 0,1,7 for the Ministry of Defense and 9,4,6 for the Ministry of transportation respectively. Nessus scanner tests indicating the high, moderate and low severity risk of vulnerabilities were 5,0,4 for the Prime Ministers, 2,1,7 for Defense and 0,1,2 for Transportation Ministry.

These data confirm that the Prime Minister’s office web application had the highest risks of the three websites. The results also portrayed that all the websites were very risky. The coordinator of the e-government program confirmed that the government websites were in transitions hence the high risks identified but also claimed that the government was doing all it could to improve them to ensure that the Libyans would accept them and use them more than was the case (Singh, & Karaulia, 2011). Following the coordinator’s acceptance that security concerns were the main hindrances towards effective transition and implementation, of e-governance in Libya, it is clear that the e-governance is not a success but that is not a shame as the government has taken initiatives to rectify the weaknesses but only time will tell since security and vulnerabilities have led to the confirmation of past data analysis claiming that high rate of failure was about 50% while partial failure was 35% and totally failure was about 15% of all e-government projects in Arab countries and developing nations (Singh, & Karaulia, 2011). The governments of these nations have continued investing into the e-government program for the past years and have progressed as time passes as the table below indicates. The lack of e-readiness has been claimed as the reasons of the contrasting data and the big difference between Bahrain and UAE with the other Arab nations.

E-government development index in Arabic countries (United Nation Survey, 2012)

Following the table, it is clear that the wealthier nations have progressed more in the implementation of e-governance to prove there are other reasons that countries like Libya ad Jordan among others have not progressed much. As earlier stated, there are limited studies on Arab countries e-government implementation and the best strategies which would prove that the lack of resources in Libya to undertake more research on the security measures needed for successful implementation inhibited Libya just as it does other poor or developing Arab countries (Singh, & Karaulia, 2011). The lack of infrastructures may also limit better implementation programs of e-government also resulting from low resources. Other factors that likely caused the failure of the e-government program in Libya may be based on political barriers, organizational barriers and cost barriers.

Conclusion

The data analysis portrays that Libya’s effort to transform its governing strategy and enforce better delivery of its services to the customers, businesses and other parties is due to many factors that would have resulted in the insecure and vulnerable websites in the early stages. The tables representing the index of progress portray that Bahrain and UAE are exceptional to other Arab countries but that may be due to their superiority in resources and infrastructure. Countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia are better-off compared the other developing Arab countries thus countries like Libya should learn and follow their strategies to ensure they progress more effectively.

References

Brownlee, J., Masoud, T. E., & Reynolds, A. (2015).  The Arab Spring: Pathways of repression and reform .

Shi, H.-z., Chen, B., & Yu, L. (2010). Analysis of Web Security Comprehensive Evaluation Tools. Second International Conference on Networks Security, Wireless Communications and Trusted Computing. (pp. 285- 289). Wuhan, Hubei: Conference Publications.

Singh, S., & Karaulia, D. S. (2011). E-Governance: Information Security Issues. International Conference on Computer Science and Information Technology (ICCSIT'2011) , (pp. 120-124).

United Nations (2012), E-government Survey: E-Government for people, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, UN Publishing Section, New York, United States.