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12/3/13, "Expert: Healthcare.gov Security Risks Even Worse After ‘Fix’," Washington Free Beacon, Elizabeth Harrington
"The Obamacare insurance marketplace is even more vulnerable to
security breaches since the administration “fixed” Healthcare.gov,
according to a cyber security expert.
Health and Human Services (HHS) released a progress report
on Sunday following its self-imposed Nov. 30 deadline to repair the
website, saying that the “team has knocked more than 400 bug fixes and
software improvements off the punch list.”
The administration said that the “site capacity is stable at its intended level,” though the site continued to crash on Monday.
The eight-page report made no mention of the website’s numerous
security flaws, which experts say put Americans’ personal information at
risk.
“It doesn’t appear that any security fixes were done at all,” David
Kennedy, CEO of the online security firm TrustedSec, told the Washington Free Beacon.
Kennedy said fundamental safeguards missing from Healthcare.gov that were identified by his company more than a month ago have yet to be put in place.
“There are a number of security concerns already with the website,
and that’s without even actually hacking the site, that’s just a purely
passive analysis of [it],” he said. “We found a number of critical
exposures that were around sensitive information, the ability to hack
into the site, things like that. We reported those issues and none of
those appear to have been addressed at all.”
"After warning
Americans when testifying before Congress on Nov. 19 to stay away from
Healthcare.gov, Kennedy now says the situation is even worse.
“They said they implemented over 400 bug fixes,” he said. “When you
recode the application to fix these 400 bugs—they were rushing this out
of the door to get the site at least so it can work a little bit—you’re
introducing more security flaws as you go along with it because you
don’t even check that code.”
“I’m a little bit more skeptical now, and I would still definitely
advise individuals to not use the website because it’s definitely
something that I don’t believe is secure and neither did the four
individuals that testified in front of Congress,” Kennedy said. “I think
there’s some major security concerns there around privacy and
information, and they haven’t even come close to being addressed, and
won’t be in the short term.”
Security exposures are not limited to the federal health exchange, but the 14 state marketplace websites as well. A breach has already been cited in Vermont, where a user was given access to another’s Social Security Number.
“That’s a whole other front of hacking,” Kennedy said. “That’s what’s
actually going to contain all the sensitive information for residents
in those states.”
“States are required to notify in the event of a breach, the federal
government is not,” he added. “So in the event that Healthcare.gov gets
compromised and all their information gets taken out of it they don’t
have to notify anybody.”
Kennedy said the team working on Healthcare.gov is more likely to hide its security flaws than address them. When it was revealed
that the most popular searches on the website were hack
attempts—confirmed by entering a semicolon in the search bar—the website
simply removed the tool.
“The top results were hacker attempts,” Kennedy said. “Their fix for
it wasn’t, ‘Hey let’s restrict people from inputting malicious code into
the website,’—because that’s how hackers break into websites—it was,
‘we’re just going to completely disable that entire function completely,
and not even show the search results back.’”
CMS did not respond to requests for comment." via Drudge
.
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