Analyzing Web Security Features using Crawlers: Study of Croatian Web

Abstract

Web pages and portals have become the main source of information, entertainment and business for most of us. However, even from the early days of the Internet it was also a place where malicious individuals could use the benefits of its ubiquity in order to perform malicious acts. Typically, malicious individuals used vulnerabilities in existing web pages and portals in order to inject and host malicious code, steal personal information from users and similar. The purpose of this paper is to analyse Croatian cyber space in order to estimate the support for security features on the web. A web crawler is proposed, with the goal to analyze various security features on the web servers and used frameworks. Results from crawling over 20.000 Croatian websites are discussed in order to get a glimpse of state of web security in Croatia.