Friday, October 4, 2013

Obamacare: "A Hacker's Wet Dream"

Paul Krugman assures us that Obamacare will work. He believes that Republicans are terrified of the possibility that everyone will like it. By his reasoning, if Obamacare is a rousing success, people will happily hand over more and more of the economy to the central government. For a true socialist that is a “consummation devoutly to be wished.”

Of course, Krugman gained some notoriety by declaring that the British National Health Service was working very, very well and that those who thought otherwise were counterrevolutionaries and liars.

The facts did not bear him out. The facts showed him to be a perfect fool. But, being Paul Krugman means never admitting to be wrong.

Among those who are worried about everything that might go wrong with Obamacare is John McAfee. You know John McAfee. If you are reading this on a PC you are very likely to be using an anti-virus program produced by the company he founded.

McAfee has had some personal problems recently, but he surely knows his way around the world of hackers. I venture that he knows more about it than even Paul Krugman.

Yesterday, in an interview he declared that Obamacare was: “a hacker’s wet dream.”

Naturally, McAfee is talking about the software, not the insurance and not the health care delivery system. As of now we mostly know how difficult it is to use the software. McAfee is concerned about hackers putting up fake Obamacare websites to gull the naive and vulnerable.

The Daily Caller reports on the interview:

For starters, McAfee said the way it is set up makes it possible for fake websites be set up to fool people to think they’re signing up forhttp://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/icon1.png Obamacare.

“It’s seriously bad,” McAfee said. “Somebody made a grave error, not in designing the program but in simply implementing the web aspect of it. I mean, for example, anybody can put up a web page and claim to be a broker for this system. There is no central place where I can go and say, ‘OK, here are all the legitimate brokershttp://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/icon1.png, the examiners for all of the states and pick and choose one.’”

“Instead, any hacker can put a website up, make it look extremely competitive, and because of the nature of the system — and this is health care, after all — they can ask you the most intimate questions, and you’re freely going to answer them,” he continued. “What’s my Social Security number? My birth date? What are my health issues?”

He adds that the problem cannot be solved by fixing the software. The system itself was poorly designed:


“Here’s the problem: It’s not something software can solve,” McAfee continued. “I mean, what idiot put this system out there and did not create a central depository? There should be one website, run by the government, you go to that website and then you can click on all of the agencies. This is insane. So, I will predict that the loss of income for the millions of Americans who are going to lose their identities — I mean, you can imagine some retiredhttp://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/icon1.png lady in Utah, who has $75,000 dollars in the bank, saving her whole life, having it wiped out in one day because she signed up for Obamacare. And believe me, this is going to happen millions of times. This is a hacker’s wet dream. I mean I cannot believe that they did this.”

There goes your confidence in government central planners. 

7 comments:

Susan said...

Stuart,

Incredibly scary info.

It might be a good idea contact Greta Van Susteren or Bill O'Reilly (who has been talking about Obamacare-related fraud) so that she/he can do a segment on this. People need to be forewarned.

Thank you.

Sam L. said...

Paullie "The Beard" Krugman does not have what I would consider a trustworthy face. Or column.

Dennis said...

Having worked in R&D developing automated information systems from the MENS (Mission Elements Needs Statement," the "as is" to the "to be" by traveling and talking to, analyzing, doing the flow charts, developing the Systems/Subsystems and Program Specifications, through implementation and fielding, writing the training programs and documentation, et al I don't believe these people, mostly politicians and lawyers, even considered the amount of time and effort that it takes to field software that is as large as this with the security requirements that are necessarily a large part of it. We are talking about millions or more lines of code with subroutines that have to work seamlessly with each other.
One only has to take a look at much of what Microsoft, Apple, et al put out to the general public that is full of bugs and error prone and they are working with simple programming compared to what would be required here.
One has to understand that one person does not do all of the coding and there are a number of ways to write a subroutine (DLL so to speak) and its interaction with other subroutines and the main programming. One wonders how many software engineers were involved and how much time they spent with the programmers both individually and as a team? I don't want to bore you with the specifics so I am just covering the surface.
All of this takes a long time to test, which could not have been done very well given the political pressure to make it happen in a time certain. The rush to field this monstrosity has of a matter of course made it perfect for hackers, or anyone else who wants to create havoc with the software, not even including the hardware requisite in handling it.
Obamacare at the least should not be fielded until the systems can demonstrate their ability to actually handle what they are supposed to accomplish and I suspect that is going to take a while if even sans distributive processing.
An aside here part of my tasking as an analyst was to test a sampling program built on a hypergeometric. I did everything I could to destroy that program and it passed. The very first time it was used it failed by creating a divide by zero. I got to go to the site and create a work around until it was reprogrammed. Just testing is no simple affair.
And one wonders why I have no use for Obamacare. If the programming et al is this bad we are boot even considering the amount of slopping thinking that went into everything else.

Stuart Schneiderman said...

Thanks, Dennis. It's great to have some information from someone who really knows the field.

Dennis said...

Next time you are in an doctor's office, a store, or business concern that relies heavily of computer systems listen to the users of those systems if you want to get a feel for the work that has to go into it especially if the system goes down or slow down.
Just take a look at the number of systems both unclassified and classified that are hacked on a routine basis almost every day.
People really need to consider what allowing their most sensitive information to be stored on these very hackable systems and really need to question how that information will be used. If it is available someone will utilize it and in many cases n to in one's own self interest.

Stuart Schneiderman said...

This is from Reuters today: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/04/us-usa-healthcare-technology-technology-idUSBRE99312620131004

Dennis said...

Interesting that in the comments section a federal manager who deals in this area stated almost the same thing I did. I cannot stress how much testing is important.
Canadian contractor? So much for Obama giving American businesses a lot of noise about contracting out of this country.
Sadly they are just going to slap this together and I hope a lot of people don't get hurt in the process, but I seriously have my doubts. GIGO rules the roost I guess.