The more I read about the Obamacare website the more it becomes clear that it is a wealth of information for identity thieves. U.S. health officials deny this, of course, but from what I’ve read they don’t even know for sure who is writing the software for the website. In June 2013, the director of High Technology Park in Minsk, Belarus, Valery Tsepkalo, told Radio Russia that “one of our clients is the health ministry of the United States – we are being paid to help Obama with the healthcare reform.” Since the U.S. health officials apparently don’t know who is writing the software they launched a probe to find out if Tsepkalo’s statement was true. The report on the probe was issued earlier this month and found no evidence of the claim being true. Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for Obama’s National Security Council, said investigators for the Department of Health and Human Services found “no indications that any software was developed in Belarus.” It took them that long to find out? Did they not know with whom they contracted to write the software?
The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, a section of the Health and Human Services Department, issued a statement about the same time the report on the probe was released. “To date, there have been no successful security attacks on HealthCare.gov and no person or group has maliciously accessed personally identifiable information from the site,” the statement said.
They should have run that statement by David Kennedy first. He is a former Marine Corps cyberwarefare expert and is currently the chief executive of the cybersecurity firm TrustedSecLLC. Kennedy has been testing HealthCare.gov for some time and has testified before Congress about its vulnerabilities. He warned, “They haven’t detected any attacks on the website, because they don’t have the capability to detect them.” He said you don’t even have to “hack” the website because it’s more akin to leaving your car door wide open. “You can literally just open up your browser, go to this [query] and extract all this information.”
The Right Scoop has a report of a Virginia man whose personal information was apparently stolen within 24 hours of his using the Obamacare website.
The Right Scoop – A Virginia man signed up for Obamacare via the Obamacare website and the very next day he started getting phone calls from spoofed phone numbers of people offering to help him sign up for health care insurance. No doubt they wanted his credit card information. When he called them out for using an illegal phone number, they hung up in a hurry.
So who do we believe, security experts like David Kennedy and people like the Virginia man who have had their personal information stolen, or do we believe the Obama administration and the officials at the Department of Health and Human Services? I don’t know about anyone else, but it’s an easy choice for me.
If this were not such a serious issue, it would almost be laughable. It is absolutely preposterous that this administration knows and cares so little about the security of such a “landmark” piece of technology.
If I was having to use this website I would definitely be signing up for something such as Lifelock, which advertises on Rush Limbaugh’s program. I know someone who was once a victim of identity theft and it took her years to get her finances and credit rating straightened out. After all I’ve read about this disaster of a website it almost makes me think they WANT it to be that bad. How much worse could it be if they tried to make it a disaster?