Alexa Top Sites

Security Of The Alexa Top Sites

Introduction The Alexa Top Websites (https://www.alexa.com/topsites) can be used to monitor the popularity trend of a website and compare the popularity of different websites (WikiPedia). In order to gauge the security posture of the internet as a whole mapping information from the Alexa Top Sites is useful. AlexaCheck.py assists by building a PostgreSQL database that stores header information from each website, the first listed resolved IP address, HTTP response code, and MX records. The header information also includes cookies that are passed during an initial connection. This approach was used to examine security of the Alexa Top Websites in a research paper CookiExt: Patching the Browser Against Session Hijacking Attacks. AlexaCheck.py can also accept a list of other domains you want to check for forced TLS encryption and inspect cookies and other header information. Specific HTTP Security Risks SSL/TLS Enforcement The Alexa Check database allows analysis of a particular website…

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