Hundreds of Dutch government websites still don’t use a secure internet connection, according to new research by the Open State Foundation.

Of the 1,816 investigated domains, only 44% had a HTTPS connection. Of the 797 government websites with a secure connection 108 are configured incorrectly so visitors are still at risk, the organisation said.

Websites without proper protection include local authority and provincial government sites as well as embassy websites in Afghanistan, China, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

‘The government stresses the importance of having a secure and reliable digital infrastructure so it is incomprehensible that our government does not do this better,’ said Rejo Zenger, policy adviser at watchdog Bits of Freedom.

‘It’s a very simple procedure which the government can give a good example and to support the development and application of encryption.’

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is the secure version of HTTP, the protocol over which data is sent between browsers and websites.