A new report from benchmarking startup SecurityScorecard that routinely measures major industries’ cybersecurity standard has revealed that U.S. federal, state and local government agencies finish last in their ranking report.
Venture capital-backed security risk benchmarking firm SecurityScorecard has revealed its newest report. The report contains an assessment of the relative security health of government and industries in a variety of categories.
They include:
- Exposure rate of passwords
- Vulnerability to malware infections
- Susceptibility to social engineering, etc.
The report ranked government agencies against 17 major private industries. The industries assessed include the likes of retail, healthcare, transportation and more.
Alongside government agencies, the telecommunications and pharmaceutical industries also ranked low. So too, did the education industry.
The best performing industries are information services, technology, the food industry and the construction industry, the report revealed.
Notably, the federal agency fared the worst in security health compared to other branches of government at state and local levels. The areas where they fared poorly include network security, software patching flaws and malware. The report pointed to the federal government’s large size as another factor for their vulnerability.
NASA performed the worst out of 600 government entities that were tracked and assessed. The factors where the space agency was most vulnerable to includes email spoofing and malware intrusions.
The United States Department of State also ranked low. Similarly, the information systems used by several states such as Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Arizona and Washington also performed poorly.
An excerpt detailing the contents of the report read:
In February 2016, SecurityScorecard analyzed and graded the current security postures of 600 local, state, and federal government organizations, each with more than 1,000 public-facing IP addresses, to determine the best and worst performers across all levels of U.S. government.
The entirety of the report can be downloaded here.
