Prevalence of DNSSEC for hospital websites in Illinois

The domain name system translates human friendly web addresses to a computer readable internet protocol address. This basic infrastructure is insecure and can be manipulated. Deployment of technology to secure the DNS system has been slow, reaching about 20% of all web sites based in the USA. Little is known about the efforts hospitals and health systems make to secure the domain name system for their websites. To investigate the prevalence of implementing Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), we analyzed the websites of the 210 public hospitals in the state of Illinois, USA. Only one Illinois hospital website was found to have implemented DNSSEC by December, 2017.