Security Considerations about the Adoption of Web 2.0 Technologies in Sensitive e-Government Processes

In the recent past, the so-called “Web 2.0” became a powerful tool to enable various eGovernment processes, especially as a link between political bodies and citizens. Politicians and managers, seeking to improve participation, embraced this technology as if it simply were a new, enhanced version of world wide web, better suited to retrieve information, opinions and feedbacks from the general public on laws, acts and policies. This approach was often naive, neglecting the less-obvious aspects of the technology, and thus bringing on significant security problems. This paper takes the decision making process as an example to show how, in the end, the result could easily be the opposite of what was desired. Malicious attackers, in fact, could quite easily exploit the vulnerabilities in these systems to hijack the process and lead to wrong decisions, also causing the public to lose trust in the systems themselves