DNS Belgium has investigated the security and health of Belgian domain names. Now the organization has published its results.

October is European Cybersecurity Month. Therefore, the Belgian non-profit internet security and registration organization DNS Belgium investigated the state of .be domain names and in particular their security. The results have now appeared online.

Secure protocol

A good indication that a website offers a secure connection is if the URL begins with “https” (Secure hypertext transfer protocol) and no longer with the outdated “http” (also a tip for identifying dubious websites). For Belgian domain names, this is only the case in 42 percent of cases.

For 38 percent, this is still “http”. The remaining twenty percent of the almost 1.8 million Belgian domain names simply do not have a URL associated with them.

Almost four out of ten .be domain names seem worryingly high, but DNS Belgium puts this number into perspective. Less than a tenth of these sites are currently active.

You have mail

What about the email addresses associated with Belgian domain names? A good security measure is one Sender policy framework (SPF), a list of approved servers that are allowed to send email from a specific domain. About half of Belgian domain names use this framework.

Another measure is this Domain key Identified email (DKIM), which authenticates the sender. Such a digital signature can be found in 37.2 percent of emails from .be domains.

There is also an additional controller included Domain-based message authentication, reporting and compliance (DMARC). This mouthful is likely to make it even harder for cybercriminals to impersonate a specific source. Almost twenty percent of Belgian domains use this.

Additional security

There are also some less common methods for securing a website. These are additional security layers that, for example, provide additional protection for a website’s data. DNS Belgium conducted a random sample of 58,358 .be domains to find out who added extra security.

The methods examined were:

• CSP
• HSTS
• X-Frame options
• X-Content-Type options

The result was nothing to celebrate. It worked for one out of five domains X-Content-Type options most popular, but there generally wasn’t much additional security.

DNS Belgium has also tested its use Security extensions for the Domain Name System (DNSSEC), which allows you to check if someone wants to steal your domain or website via fake DNS records. That was less than a third of Belgian domain names.

Diploma

Despite the sometimes lower percentages, .be domain names are certainly not insecure, says DNS Belgium. Websites that distribute a lot of sensitive information, such as government portals and banks, are particularly well secured. Of course, nothing is completely watertight and the government sometimes suffers from hackers.

The challenge lies with websites operated by private individuals or small organizations, such as local sports clubs. The configuration and security there could be significantly better. In general, Belgian domain names could use more additional security and the security of their emails could be expanded a bit.