Right Wing Attacks on Healthcare.gov Site Confirmed
The House Homeland Security Committee recently posted a video on their YouTube account which highlights part of the committee’s question of Roberta Stempfley. Stempfley was acting assistant secretary of DHS’s Office of Cyber-Security and confirmed 16 attacks on the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) website in 2013.
One successful attack Stempfley pointed to was designed to deny access to the site. Called a Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, this form of attacked is intended to make a network unavailable by repeatedly accessing servers and saturating them with more traffic than the site was designed for.
Right-wingers have distributed the link to the tools needed to perform the attacks. Informationweek, and other sites mentioned the tools had been circulated via social media.
“Destroy Obama Care” was the name given to the attack by individuals calling themselves “right wing patriots.”
The message distributed said: “This program displays an alternative page of the ObamaCare website and has no virus, Trojans or cookies. The purpose is to overload the site so as to deny service and possibly crash the system.”
Some news sites have spoken about this attack, and Congress held hearings to discuss the attack. Despite the mainstream media being aware of the problem, they’re ignoring it as they continue to talk about the site not working.