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When Hacking is Unnecesary

November 13, 2013, 9:52 am

The Feds are claiming they know of at least one Denial of Service (DOS) attack on the Obamacare exchange.  Talk about irrelevant.   This is a site that crashes under the onslaught of about a dozen regular users.  A DOS attack could be executed by me and three of my friends just by trying to log on and create accounts.  First day exchange visitors are guilty of an unwitting DDOS attack just for navigating to the site.

I was just thinking this morning that it would have been a funny Onion article to show some average schlub with a headline that Joe Smith was being accused of a DOS attack for visiting the exchange on October 1.

Tags: , , ,
Category: Health Care

4 Comments

  2. Arrian:

    Of course it's going to get hit by DDOS attacks, anything that noticeable on the Internet has a big "Kick Me" sign on it. They don't even have to build their own security to handle those attacks, though, there are services that will monitor, detect an attack, re-route everything through their own, purpose designed data centers and scrub the traffic before it even gets to healthcare.gov's servers.

    DOS attacks are a cost of doing business, just like shop lifters. Hardly news worthy unless you're responding to someone who asks, and the answer should be "Yeah, they happen, we have infrastructure in place to deal with them."

    November 13, 2013, 12:28 pm

  3. MingoV:

    I got a good laugh from the last paragraph.

    November 13, 2013, 3:43 pm

  4. mmmwright:

    Yes, well according to Reuters they did it to themselves, so blaming hackers is just par for the course, isn't it?

    Hancock described the situation as similar to
    what happens when hackers conduct a distributed denial of service, or
    DDOS, attack on a website: they get large numbers of computers
    to simultaneously request information from the server that runs a
    website, overwhelming it and causing it to crash or otherwise stumble.
    "The site basically DDOS'd itself," he said.

    http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/05/us-usa-healthcare-technology-analysis-idUSBRE99407T20131005

    November 13, 2013, 5:00 pm