Did Hackers Really Break Into the Obamacare Website? No.
Tonight’s screaming headline at Breitbart “News,” for an article by wingnut hack John Nolte: OBAMACARE: HEALTHCARE.GOV SITE SUCCESSFULLY HACKED IN JULY. As usual, they pick a photo (probably unlicensed) that shows Obama smiling, because that never fails to enrage the knuckle-draggers.
The same federal government that wants to centralize and computerize healthcare, including your health records, got itself hacked back in July. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Healthcare.gov site, the central hub of the ObamaCare boondoggle, was broken into by a hacker who, thankfully, did not access anyone’s personal data.
If that news isn’t troubling enough, the Department of Health and Human Services only discovered the hack last week.
Whoa, that sounds pretty terrible! They hacked the public healthcare.gov website? Really?
No, not really. What Nolte fails to tell you, possibly because he doesn’t understand these kinds of things, is that the hacked server was what’s known as a “staging server” — a completely separate server that’s only used to test code and web applications before making them visible to the public. It was not part of the public site.
US-CERT analysis indicated that only one server was involved. It was not running HealthCare.gov, but was instead used by programmers to test new code before it goes live.
The test server was not supposed to be connected to the Internet, but somehow was. In addition, access to it was protected by a default password installed by the manufacturer, said Albright, who declined to say if that default was 1-2-3-4-5 or something equally breachable.
Granted, this is still not a good thing; the staging server should not have been connected to the Internet without passwords or IP-based restrictions. But it’s not even close to being as serious as they want you to think. Right wing blogs like Breitbart are hysterically distorting the story and giving readers the impression that the main healthcare.gov site was hacked — and it was absolutely not. Don’t be fooled by these idiots; once again, they don’t know what they’re talking about.