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Security report for berlin.de

Land Berlin · Government · Germany

Medium risk. 4 critical or high findings in GDPR outside view and SSL/TLS.

Security score

70/100

Risk levelMedium

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

Berlin.de is the official city portal of Germany's capital, Berlin, providing comprehensive information and services for residents, tourists, and stakeholders. The website offers a wide range of public services including online administrative procedures, cultural event information, tourism guidance, and career opportunities within the city administration. It serves as a central hub for official communications and citizen engagement, reflecting the city's governance and community priorities. Technically, the website is hosted on Amazon AWS infrastructure, utilizing a custom or proprietary CMS with a modern JavaScript and CSS stack. The site demonstrates good mobile optimization, accessibility features, and SEO practices, ensuring a positive user experience across devices. The use of async scripts and crossorigin attributes indicates attention to performance and security. From a security perspective, the site enforces HTTPS and avoids exposing sensitive data in its HTML content. However, it lacks explicit security headers and does not publicly provide vulnerability disclosure or incident response information, which are areas for improvement. Privacy compliance is strong with a comprehensive GDPR-compliant privacy policy, though no cookie consent mechanism was detected. Overall, Berlin.de presents a trustworthy, professional, and well-maintained digital presence for the city government, with minor gaps in security transparency and cookie consent that could be addressed to enhance compliance and user trust.

Scanned

NIS2 and GDPR posture

GDPR outside view
28/ 100 · High
Checks completed
7of 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

4 findings rated critical or high. Fix these first.

  1. GDPR outside view

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

    • Critical

      EU business without adequate privacy measures

      EU businesses are subject to strict GDPR requirements

      What to do: Implement comprehensive GDPR compliance including privacy policy, cookie consent, and data protection measures

    • 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

    • High

      No Cookie Consent Banner found

      GDPR requires explicit consent for non-essential cookies

      What to do: Implement a cookie consent banner that appears on first visit

  2. SSL/TLS

    TLS encrypts the connection and proves the site is really yours. Weak or expiring certificates trigger browser warnings and put traffic at risk.

    • High

      Weak SSL Key Length

      SSL certificate uses 256-bit key, which is considered weak

      What to do: Use at least 2048-bit RSA or 256-bit ECC key

      • CWE-326
      • OWASP A04:2025
      • Mozilla TLS: Mozilla Server Side TLS 6.0 intermediate: rsa_key_size 2048

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Keep watching berlin.de

This scan found 20 issues across 6 checks. Monitoring re-runs those checks daily, emails you when something material changes and records each fix, so you can show progress.

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  • 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

SSL/TLS
75
Security headers
85
Email security
60
DNS health
70
Network security
100
GDPR outside view
28
Average
70

Not counted

  • 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

Breach exposure

Leaked credentials and lookalike domains from OffSeq Breach. The counts are free; the detailed lists are paid add-ons.

Dark web exposure

Add-on

Leaked records that mention berlin.de, from OffSeq Breach.

Total records
4,545
Employees
197
Customers
3,362
Third parties
986
Weak passwords
14%

Latest record dated 2026-06-17 · 65 subdomains affected

See the 10 newest leaked credentials

A one-off add-on to this report that lists the most recent identifier and password pairs OffSeq Breach holds for berlin.de.

Select it in the checkout above.

Masked preview

  • –berlin.de2026-06-17
  • –berlin.de2026-06-17
  • –berlin.de2026-06-15
  • –www.berlin.de2026-06-12
  • –berlin.de2026-05-29

Breach keeps ingesting new leaks, so these numbers can grow between scans.

Open in Breach(opens in a new tab)Monitor on Breach(opens in a new tab)

Technical appendix

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

Business context

Business profile

Berlin.de holds a strong market position as the official digital gateway for Berlin's government and public services. Its business model is centered on providing authoritative information and facilitating administrative processes for citizens and visitors. The portal supports multiple sectors including government administration, culture, tourism, and employment. The site’s extensive service offerings and integration with related domains like service.berlin.de and karriereportal-stellen.berlin.de indicate a mature ecosystem. The target audience includes residents, tourists, public servants, and businesses interacting with city services. The portal’s large scale and consistent branding reinforce its credibility and central role in Berlin’s digital infrastructure.

Security posture

The website demonstrates a solid security posture with mandatory HTTPS and no visible exposure of sensitive data. The use of Amazon AWS DNS and hosting suggests reliable infrastructure. However, the absence of explicit security headers such as Content-Security-Policy and lack of published incident response or vulnerability disclosure policies indicate room for maturity. No known vulnerabilities or malicious indicators were detected. The site’s privacy policy is comprehensive and GDPR compliant, but cookie consent mechanisms are missing, which could pose compliance risks. Overall, the security maturity is good but could be enhanced by adopting best practices in security headers and transparency.

Recommendations

  1. Implement and publish a security.txt file to facilitate vulnerability reporting and improve transparency.
  2. Add and enforce security headers like Content-Security-Policy, X-Frame-Options, and X-XSS-Protection to strengthen browser security.
  3. Introduce a cookie consent banner or mechanism to comply fully with GDPR cookie regulations.
  4. Publish incident response contact information to improve trust and readiness for security events.
  5. Regularly audit third-party scripts and dependencies to ensure no vulnerable libraries are included.
Site observations

Automated reading of the public site. Ratings are indicative.

Business

Company
Land Berlin
Description
Die offizielle Website der Stadt Berlin. Interessante Informationen für alle Berlinerinnen, Berliner und Touristen.
Key services
Online-Verfahren und Dienstleistungen der Stadtverwaltung, Informationen zu Politik und Verwaltung, Kultur- und Veranstaltungshinweise, Tourismusinformationen, Karriereportal für den öffentlichen Dienst
Content quality
excellent
Branding
consistent

Technology

Stack
JavaScript, CSS, AWS DNS (Amazon Route 53)
Frameworks
Foxtrot (custom or internal framework)
Performance
moderate
Mobile
good
Accessibility
good
SEO
good

Security

Observed score
85/100
Good practices seen
  • HTTPS enforced
  • No exposed sensitive data in HTML
  • Use of async scripts with crossorigin attribute

Analytics and tracking

Tracking level
minimal
Privacy practices
good

Advertising

Transparency
poor

Site quality

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

Key observations

  1. Official government website for Berlin city administration
  2. Comprehensive public service and cultural information
  3. Good accessibility and multilingual support
  4. No signs of malicious or suspicious content
  5. No visible security.txt or explicit security policy pages
  6. No cookie consent banner detected, possible area for compliance improvement
Technical notes

Notes

The website uses a custom CMS likely tailored for government use, hosted on Amazon AWS infrastructure as indicated by the DNS nameservers. The front-end employs modern JavaScript and CSS bundles with asynchronous loading and crossorigin attributes for performance and security. The site is mobile optimized and accessible, with multilingual support. Performance is moderate, with room for optimization. SEO is well addressed with proper meta tags and Open Graph images. No major technical debt or outdated technologies were detected, but the absence of some security headers and cookie consent mechanisms suggests areas for modernization.
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

Earlier scans of this domain

  1. 69/100Medium27 findingsView report
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