US Government Sites Required to Switch to HTTPS by the End of Next Year

Paranoia is a useful and necessary thing when you are in such an initially weakly protected environment as the Internet. So the US government has decided that in order to complicate the work of Russian and Chinese hackers who constantly crack them, all public services need at least to switch to HTTPS. Transition is scheduled until the end of 2016.

To date, most of the approximately 1,200 US public service sites use the unencrypted HTTP protocol. This allows you to easily intercept the content transmitted between the user and the site and replace it.
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The memorandum issued by the White House’s management and budget division explains in detail why it is necessary to switch to the HTTPS protocol, what it can give, and what is important - what it cannot. In particular, although HTTPS provides encrypted communication between the client and the server, it does not guarantee that the server was not compromised in advance.

All of these explanations are designed to increase employee awareness of Internet security. To clarify technical issues, a special site https.cio.gov has been created.

US government networks are constantly becoming a target for hacking. At various times, the State Department , the Pentagon , pension funds , State Department e-mail , and White House computers were attacked.