14 DAY TRIAL // Because server admins fail to properly set up HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), a large amount of today's HTTPS traffic can be hijacked via trivial attacks.
HSTS is Web security policy supported by most of today's Web browsers. HSTS helps webmasters protect their service and their users against HTTPS downgrades, man-in-the-middle attacks, and cookie hijacking for HTTPS connections.
One in twenty HTTPS connections is in danger
According to a recent Netcraft study, 95% of all of today's servers running HTTPS either fail to set up HSTS or come with configuration errors that open server-client connections to the above-listed attack scenarios.
What's more interesting is the fact that Netcraft has been running the same scan for the past three years, and proper HSTS usage has remained at the same levels.
This shows that webmasters aren't learning or being told that they've set up HSTS in an incorrect manner or that they just don't care.
The easiest attack scenario against these insecure sites is the HTTPS downgrade attack, during which attackers can choose multiple methods of forcing a seemingly secure HTTPS connection into using no encryption at all or a weaker certificate that can be attacked and broken later on.
According to security researchers, among those 95% sites that have failed to set up HSTS, you can find a lot of banks and websites that handle financial operations.
You can activate HSTS by adding one line in your server config
What's more mind-boggling is that implementing HSTS is done by adding one single line of code to a server's configuration.
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000;
This line makes the server tell browsers to access its content only via HTTPS connections, and it includes the maximum keep-alive value of one year.
When this setting is active, even if the user types in the "http://" prefix by hand in their URL bar, the browser will automatically change that to "https://" at the server's request.