R

ecently, internet’s 25th birthday sparked a wave of celebrations all around the world. Over the course of these 25 years, the browser makers like Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla have developed a number of security features and technologies to make the websites safer and protect them from hacking attacks.

Sadly, many of these technologies haven’t been adopted enthusiastically by the website owners due to various reasons. Today, only 40% of the world wide web uses HTTPS. To raise an awareness of these security methods, Mozilla security engineer April Night recently released a new project named Observatory.

Mozilla Observatory is a free website scanning service that allows website operators to quickly analyze their condition and know if they are not using modern security technologies.

Here’s how Observatory’s GitHub page describes this free website security scanner:

The Mozilla HTTP Observatory is a set of tools to analyze your website and inform you if you are utilizing the many available methods to secure it.

Apart from preparing a quick report, Observatory uses a simple grading system that provides an instant feedback. If you are a developer or a sysadmin, Observatory also provides you links to useful documentation to help you implement these technologies.

Written in Python, Mozilla Observatory codebase is open source

Observatory has been under development for months and Mozilla approved it for a public launch just yesterday.

This free website security scanner is built on the top of a Python codebase. To run a local installation on your workstation, you need to install git, PostgreSQL, and Redis before grabbing Observatory codebase.

The whole service is a sum of three projects:

http-observatory – the scanner/grader

http-observatory-cli – the command line interface

http-observatory-website – the web interface

This free website security scanner is open source and you can take a look at it on GitHub.

The current scenario, as reported by Mozilla Observatory:

If you take a look at Observatory home page, you’ll find out that Observatory has been used to scan more than 1.3 million websites so far. Sadly, 91% of these websites don’t employ modern security measures. Among these 1.3 million websites, some websites are the most popular ones in the world.

Mozilla hopes that people will use Observatory to make the web a more secure place and contribute to the project.

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