List of UK Insurance companies that are not secure by default

By Stephen Kellett
18 December, 2017

This is one of several posts of the topic of security of websites. Inspired by my initial post on the security of UK banks.

The reason for splitting this data into multiple posts is to make it more manageable. So that data on one institution is not mixed with data on another type of institution.

I thought it would be interesting to look at each bank in the UK to see if when you visit their company homepage, is that secure by default? That is, is the page loaded by HTTPS? There are more tests than this that you could do, but that’s the baseline. If they can’t meet that then the other tests are meaningless.

Some banks provide the website in both http and https versions. This is bad practice. If someone visits the website as http then the customer should be served the https version of the page.

Also please note, these test results are for a desktop computer visiting the website. A mobile phone may well get a different experience. In other words desktop visitors may get a secure site, but mobile visitors might not. Or vice versa.

The following key is used for the secure status:

Yes The site is secure, loaded via https
Dual The site can be loaded via http, or via https.
Invalid The site loads via https, but the security certificate is invalid and thus the site is insecure.
Partial The site loads via https, but loads some parts of the page without https. The site is insecure.
No The site is loaded via http, not via https.
Fixed The site is loaded via https, but at the time of first writing it was loaded via http.
?? We could not find a website to evaluate.

We tested 23 insurance companies. We found 7 insurance companies that did not have a secure home page (not https or did have https with an invalid security certificate). That is 30% of UK insurance companies have security vulnerabilities.

Insurance Company Secure Home Page
AEGON UK Yes https://www.aegon.co.uk/index.html
AXA Yes https://www.axa.co.uk/home.aspx
Allianz SE Yes https://www.allianz.com/en/
Aviva Yes https://www.aviva.co.uk/
Direct Line Insurance Yes https://www.directline.com/
FM Global Yes https://www.fmglobal.com/
Hiscox Yes https://www.hiscox.co.uk/
Legal & General Yes https://www.legalandgeneral.com/insurance/
NFU Mutual Yes https://www.nfumutual.co.uk/
Old Mutual No http://www.oldmutualplc.com/
Phoenix No http://www.phoenixlife.co.uk/
Prudential No http://www.prudential.co.uk/
QBE Insurance Yes https://www.group.qbe.com/
Royal London Asset Management Yes https://www.rlam.co.uk/
Royal London Group Yes https://www.royallondon.com/
RSA Insurance Group Yes https://www.rsagroup.com/
Standard Life Yes https://www.standardlife.com/dotcom/index.page
Southern Rock Insurance No http://www.sricl.com/
XL Group No http://xlgroup.com/
Zurich Insurance Yes https://www.zurich.co.uk/

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