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Security report for aclanthology.org

ASSOC. OF COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS · Education · United States

Partial score · DNS & email only

25/100

0–100, higher is better. How it is calculated

The ACL Anthology is a specialized digital archive managed by the Association of Computational Linguistics, hosting over 113,000 research papers in computational linguistics and natural language processing. It serves an academic and research audience, providing open access to scholarly materials with clear licensing under Creative Commons. The website is built using modern static site generation technology (Hugo) and frontend frameworks such as Bootstrap and jQuery, hosted by Bluehost. The platform demonstrates good technical maturity with mobile responsiveness and clear navigation, though performance is moderate. From a security perspective, the site uses HTTPS and has domain transfer protections in place, but lacks DNSSEC and security headers, which are recommended for enhanced security. No explicit privacy, cookie, or terms of service policies are present, indicating a gap in compliance and transparency. No contact information or incident response details are provided, which limits user support and security communication. Overall, the ACL Anthology website is a trustworthy and professional academic resource with excellent content quality and business credibility. However, it would benefit from improved privacy compliance, security hardening, and clearer user communication regarding policies and contact channels.

Scanned

4 of 7 checks could not complete. The site may be unreachable or blocking automated scans, so the results below cover only what could be checked. Try a rescan later.

NIS2 and GDPR posture

GDPR outside view
35/ 100 · High
Checks completed
3of 7

NIS2 Art. 21(2)

  1. (a) Risk analysis and security policies: Not visible from outside
  2. (b) Incident handling: One indicator
  3. (c) Business continuity, backups and crisis management: Not visible from outside
  4. (d) Supply chain security: Not visible from outside
  5. (e) Secure acquisition, development and maintenance, including vulnerability handling: Partly checked
  6. (f) Assessing the effectiveness of security measures: Not visible from outside
  7. (g) Cyber hygiene and security training: Not visible from outside
  8. (h) Cryptography and encryption: Partly checked
  9. (i) HR security, access control and asset management: One indicator
  10. (j) Multi-factor authentication and secured communications: Not visible from outside

This scan rated NIS2 with an earlier keyword method that is no longer shown; rescan for the per-article view. Risk management, continuity, supply chain, training, MFA, management oversight (Art. 20) and incident reporting (Art. 23) need internal evidence, and Guard cannot tell whether NIS2 applies to this organisation.

GDPR is indicative only, based on publicly visible signals: Articles 7, 12, 13 and 32 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 and Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive. Not a certification or legal assessment.

Priority findings

7 findings rated critical or high. Fix these first.

  1. Security headers

    Security headers are instructions your web server sends to every visitor’s browser. Missing ones leave visitors more exposed to attacks such as clickjacking and injected scripts.

    • High

      Missing Strict-Transport-Security header

      Forces HTTPS connections

      What to do: Add "Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload"

      • CWE-319
      • OWASP A04:2025
      • ASVS V3.4.1
    • High

      Missing X-Frame-Options header

      Prevents clickjacking attacks

      What to do: Add "X-Frame-Options: DENY" or "X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN"

    • High

      Missing Content-Security-Policy header

      Controls resources the browser is allowed to load

      What to do: Implement a Content-Security-Policy appropriate for your application

      • ASVS V3.4.3
      • OWASP Secure Headers: OWASP Secure Headers Project recommends Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'self'; form-action 'self'; base-uri 'self'; object-src 'none';…

  2. GDPR outside view

    These are the privacy signals visitors and data protection authorities look for under GDPR.

    • High

      No Privacy Policy found

      GDPR requires a clear and accessible privacy policy

      What to do: Add a comprehensive privacy policy page and link to it prominently

    • High

      No Cookie Policy found

      GDPR requires clear information about cookie usage

      What to do: Add a dedicated cookie policy explaining cookie usage and purposes

Need hands-on remediation? Email guard@offseq.com

Keep watching aclanthology.org

This scan found 12 issues across 2 checks. Monitoring re-runs those checks daily, emails you when something material changes and records each fix, so you can show progress.

Daily monitoring

Recommended

€25per month

  • TLS certificates and expiry
  • DNS records
  • SPF, DKIM and DMARC
  • Security headers
  • GDPR and NIS2 posture
  • Exposed services
  • Third-party trackers
  • Security score drift

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Results by check

Each check with its score, findings and the evidence it collected.

How this score is calculated

The security score runs 0–100, higher is better. It is the plain average of the security checks that completed in this scan, each counted equally. A check that could not run is left out: it counts neither as a pass nor as a fail.

Counted in this score

Security headers
15
GDPR outside view
35
Average
25

Not counted

  • SSL/TLS: did not complete in this scan.
  • Email security: did not complete in this scan.
  • DNS health: did not complete in this scan.
  • Network security: did not complete in this scan.
  • NIS2 outside view: Re-weights evidence from the TLS, email, DNS, network and hygiene checks, so counting it would count that evidence twice. Shown on its own.
  • OffSeq Observations: An AI reading of the site, useful context but not reproducible evidence. Shown on its own.

Findings that cap the score at 49

Each of these is serious on its own, so while any is present the site cannot rate better than high risk, however good the other checks are.

  • The certificate is not trusted by browsers
  • The website is not served over HTTPS
  • A database, remote desktop, file-sharing or Telnet service is reachable from the internet
  • The page loads a script from a compromised source
  • The domain registration has expired
  • SPF authorises every server to send mail as the domain

Partial scans

When the site blocks Guard or most checks cannot run, the score covers only the checks that ran (usually DNS and email), is capped at 75 and is shown as partial, without a risk level.

Risk levels

  • Critical0–25
  • High26–49
  • Medium50–75
  • Low76–100

Technical appendix

Business context, site observations and technical notes gathered during the scan, and the standards behind each reference.

Business context

Business profile

The ACL Anthology occupies a leading position as a non-profit academic digital library in the computational linguistics domain. Its business model focuses on providing open access to research papers, supported by a volunteer team. The target audience includes researchers, academics, and practitioners in natural language processing. The organization is US-based and relatively young, founded in 2020, but leverages a large corpus of historical and current research. The platform's partnership ecosystem includes GitHub for code hosting and Google Groups for mailing list communication. The absence of commercial advertising or tracking indicates a focus on academic integrity and user privacy.

Security posture

The website demonstrates a moderate security posture with HTTPS enabled and domain transfer protections. However, the lack of DNSSEC and absence of security headers such as Content Security Policy, HSTS, and X-Frame-Options represent areas for improvement. No vulnerability disclosure or incident response information is published, which could hinder timely security communication. The site does not collect user data via forms beyond a search input, reducing attack surface. Overall, the security maturity is adequate for an academic archive but could be enhanced to align with best practices and compliance requirements.

Recommendations

  1. Enable DNSSEC on the domain to protect against DNS spoofing and improve domain security.
  2. Implement and publish a comprehensive privacy policy and cookie policy to enhance GDPR compliance and user trust.
  3. Add security headers such as Content Security Policy (CSP), HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), and X-Frame-Options to harden the website against common web attacks.
  4. Provide clear contact information including security incident response contacts and a vulnerability disclosure policy to improve transparency and readiness.
  5. Regularly audit and update third-party libraries and dependencies to mitigate potential vulnerabilities and maintain technical hygiene.
Site observations

Automated reading of the public site. Ratings are indicative.

Business

Company
ASSOC. OF COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
Description
The ACL Anthology hosts a large collection of papers (113,119) on computational linguistics and natural language processing, serving as a digital archive and resource for the research community.
Key services
Hosting and providing access to research papers, Providing RSS feeds for latest papers, Offering BibTeX downloads of the full anthology
Content quality
excellent
Branding
consistent

Technology

Stack
Hugo 0.140.2, Bootstrap 4.2.1, jQuery 3.3.1, Popper.js 1.14.6, FontAwesome 5.7.2, SortableJS 1.15.0
Frameworks
Bootstrap
Performance
moderate
Mobile
good
Accessibility
basic
SEO
good

Security

Observed score
70/100
Good practices seen
  • HTTPS is implied by URL (https://aclanthology.org/)
  • Domain status clientTransferProhibited

Analytics and tracking

Tracking level
minimal
Privacy practices
poor

Advertising

Transparency
poor

Site quality

Design
good
User experience
good
Content relevance
excellent
Navigation
good
Professionalism
good
Trustworthiness
high

Key observations

  1. Website is a well-maintained academic digital library for computational linguistics.
  2. No privacy, cookie, or terms of service policies explicitly found on the homepage or main navigation.
  3. No contact emails or phone numbers explicitly listed on the homepage or footer.
  4. No security.txt or vulnerability disclosure information found.
  5. No incident response or security policy information available.
  6. Website uses modern frontend technologies and is mobile responsive.
  7. No advertising or tracking scripts detected.
  8. Content is safe and suitable for general audiences.
Technical notes

Notes

The ACL Anthology website is built using the Hugo static site generator, leveraging Bootstrap 4.2.1 for responsive design, jQuery for DOM manipulation, Popper.js for UI elements, FontAwesome for icons, and SortableJS for interactive sorting features. Hosting is provided by Bluehost, a reputable provider. The site is mobile optimized with good navigation clarity and SEO meta tags. Performance is moderate, likely due to the large volume of content and static assets. There is no evidence of a traditional CMS; the static site approach enhances security and performance but requires manual content updates. Technical risks include missing DNSSEC and security headers, which should be addressed to reduce attack vectors.
Standards and sources

Reference chips under each finding point to the standard, regulation or specification the finding relates to. They are taken from the official datasets below and mapped conservatively: a finding with no defensible link shows none. NIS2 and GDPR references mark where a finding is relevant evidence, not a compliance verdict. Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/2690 binds digital infrastructure and digital service providers; for other entities it is the most detailed public reading of the Article 21 measures. WCAG, EN 301 549, European Accessibility Act and Web Accessibility Directive references name the requirement an automated accessibility rule relates to; they are not a conformance verdict.

Retrieved 2026-10-25

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