Assessing the Portuguese Web applications security

Portugal has recently deployed an important number of governmental services to the World Wide Web. Concurrently, major services in Universities, Health Care, and most Public entities are also following this trend. For 2011, the Portuguese government will take these measures even further in the scope of a technological upgrade plan for Portugal. This will make Web applications, more than ever, one of the most critical gateways for exchanging sensitive information within the country. It is also true that Portugal has recently been a victim of repeated attacks to specific Web applications related with government, universities and all kind of public entities. The above fact makes imperative the existence of a study which assesses a certain amount of Web applications within these domains and extrapolates the results to understand the general security state of Web applications in Portugal. This paper will reflect the early state of such a study in order to give an early view of the results, major concerns, difficulties to date, and the planning for the future.