Vulnerability assessments: a case study of Jordanian universities

Websites of universities are considered the most important gateways to those Universities. They are heavily used by faculty members, employees, past, current and future students. They have a significant impact on University popularity and ranking. From a security perspective, those websites can be targets for a large number of possible security attacks such as: Flooding, denial of service (DoS), web defacement, etc. Attacks can be also from outsiders as well as insiders. In this paper, we conducted a vulnerability assessment on Websites of universities in Jordan. To ensure that our tests are constructive, we only employed passive penetration testing methods. Results showed that a significant number of those evaluated universities have critical or sever level vulnerabilities. Such vulnerabilities can be relatively easily be exploited by security attacks or attackers.