In an article this Sunday over at Salon published this past Sunday it was exposed for the second time that the government healthcare site, being used for the Affordable Care Act, is still vulnerable. A panel of experts met with the House Science, Space and Technology Committee on Thursday and expressed concerns of just how easy it was to hack the website, where more then 2.1million people have signed up for healthcare. The panel had met previously with this same committee, warning them back in October of glaring security flaws, and even recommending that the website be taken offline in order to fix the holes in the system.
While the website itself has seen a face lift, and been reworked to provide a better end user experience, the flaws in the security are still prevalent. One such flaw, discovered by David Kennedy who heads TrustedSec LLC, was described as;
A short computer program Kennedy claims to have written in five minutes was able to automatically collect some 70,000 records in roughly four minutes. Kennedy didn’t even have to hack the site to obtain this data. The information was available via the Internet.
Not surprisingly, the mood of the committee shifted to politics quickly, blaming GOP members for bringing in security experts to help bring down the website, that was a keystone of the Affordable Care Act. However Kennedy assured the committee that politics played no role in any of his investigations, and all of his data had been reviewed by his peers as to it’s legitimacy. Hopefully these security holes will be patched, but only time will tell if the warning is heeded by the security experts, or if we have another Target level breech on our hands within the next year or so.
For the original article, you can find it at Reuters