93% of Chinese govt websites have security loopholes: report

More than 93 percent of nearly 1,000 Chinese government websites under evaluation have security lapses, and 97 percent of websites at the district or county level have security risks, a recent report has announced.

Released by the China Software Testing Center under the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the 2014 report on the performance of China's government websites covers sites at the ministerial, provincial, municipal, district and county levels.

The report said 43 percent of the websites were categorized as "extreme risk," while 30 percent were "high risk."

Nearly half of all the sites examined were found to contain more than 30 security loopholes, and at least 70 had more than 100 security loopholes.

The report also pointed out that this year's most widespread security failures, including the "Heartbleed Bug," information leakage and cross-site request forgery, were detected in 27 percent of the websites.

Website administrators have not established effective security and protection systems, and cannot keep a watchful eye on network security development trends or take effective measures, according to the report.

The report was also pessimistic about the security of mobile government. The evaluation found that 60 percent of mobile government apps were prone to being tampered with and decompiled. Their lack of security mechanisms could easily lead to phishing attacks and leakage of private or sensitive information, the report said.

A total of 2,430 government websites were hacked in 2013, accounting for 4 percent of the government websites checked, a survey by the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center has found.

The hacks have had an adverse impact on the government's image and pose serious threats to government operations, as well as to the security of governmental and individual information, the center said.