2016 Presidential Candidate Security Investigation (infosecinstitute.com)

New submitter Fryan writes: InfoSec Institute has assessed the security posture of 16 of the presidential candidates' websites. This is an indicator of the level of security awareness the candidate and the campaign staff has. The recent breaches and security lapses of high profile individuals highlight the absolute need for everyone to take security awareness seriously. The hacking of the Director of the CIA's (John Brennan) personal email account, and the storage of classified emails on a personal email server with Hillary Clinton, show how damaging a lack of basic good security hygiene can be. In this survey (of only the best known presidential candidates, not the scads of others), the authors give both their highest grade (an A) and lowest (a D) for candidates still in the race to two Republicans, Ben Carson and Jim Gilmore, respectively; surprising for a tech-focused campaign, Lawrence Lessig (who has ended his candidacy since the survey began) ranked even lower, with a D-.

Speaking of presidential candidates, the fourth Republican debate, hosted by Fox Business, will kick off about an hour after this post goes live (9:00 PM Eastern, 0200 GMT). Feel free to discuss it alongside the security report.

Comments

Re:More live-debate commenting

[Anonymous Coward]

Carly Fiorina just said we need "Uber, but for health care".

In theory, the Democrats are generally more compassionate so I feel a certain social obligation to vote for them. But, on the personal issues that matter to me, the centrists Democrats have made a lot of unforced errors.

As a biomedical research scientist who values individual freedom, Obama's stifling of (direct-to-consumer) personal genomics - e.g. what the FDA did to 23andMe - is going to make it very hard for me to vote for any of the "centrist" Democrats.

There are other countries in the world where speech is seen as more dangerous than action - where porn is outlawed but prostitution is legal. But I think the USA really got it right with it's first amendment. When it comes to actions, particularly actions that can hurt or kill someone (even just selling someone a bad burrito), then government regulation is appropriate. But when it comes to pure speech - even for commercial purposes - then the government should do everything it can to stay out of the way. When medical diagnostic procedures are invasive and can cause harm just by themselves then regulation is appropriate. But for diagnostic procedures that involve low risk activities like spitting in a tube, there really needs to be a distinction between diagnosis and treatment. One of the reasons I voted for Obama was that he was billed as a scholar of constitutional law - who would presumably believe in freedom of speech - which makes his decision to shut down 23andMe particularly disappointing.

And it's not just DTC personal genomics. One of the reasons that health care in the USA is so bad is because of certain key artificial monopolies imposed by the US government. In particular, the AMA works closely with the US government to create a severe shortage of medical doctors. Of course, this drives up wages for medical doctors. But patients have to pay much more for much less. And then the USA also imposes bizarre and dysfunctional artificial monopolies on medical drug production in the form of its horribly broken patent system.

Supposedly Obama deserves all kinds of credit for reforming healthcare in the USA, but all he really did was layer on additional bureaucracy in the form of mandatory health insurance while failing to address the underlying market failures (e.g. dysfunctional artificial government imposed monopolies).

So, while government funding for basic biomedical research has been the worst in many decades, Obama is also layering on all kinds of additional bureaucracy to stifle private sector innovation. I mean, good luck getting insurance reimbursement for 23andMe.

Would the Republicans be better? Probably not. But the centrist Democrats sure ain't heroes either.