Prevalence of DNSSEC for hospital websites in Illinois

TL;DR

This study investigates the adoption of DNSSEC security technology among Illinois hospital websites, revealing extremely low implementation rates as of December 2017.

Contribution

It provides the first focused analysis of DNSSEC deployment in hospital websites, highlighting the gap in security practices within healthcare institutions.

Findings

Only 1 out of 210 hospital websites implemented DNSSEC.

DNSSEC adoption among Illinois hospitals was nearly nonexistent.

The study underscores the need for increased DNS security awareness in healthcare.

Abstract

The domain name system translates human friendly web addresses to a computer readable internet protocol address. This basic infrastructure is insecure and can be manipulated. Deployment of technology to secure the DNS system has been slow, reaching about 20% of all web sites based in the USA. Little is known about the efforts hospitals and health systems make to secure the domain name system for their websites. To investigate the prevalence of implementing Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), we analyzed the websites of the 210 public hospitals in the state of Illinois, USA. Only one Illinois hospital website was found to have implemented DNSSEC by December, 2017.