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Hacker Says He Could Access 70,000 Healthcare.Gov Records In 4 Minutes
cold fjord writes with this excerpt from Computerworld: "[W]hite hat hacker David Kennedy, CEO of TrustedSec, may feel like he's beating his head against a stone wall. Kennedy said, 'I don't understand how we're still discussing whether the website is insecure or not. ... It is insecure — 100 percent.' Kennedy has continually warned that healthcare.gov is insecure. In November, after the website was allegedly 'fixed,' he told Congress it was even more vulnerable to hacking and privacy breaches. ... 'Out of the issues identified last go around, there has been a half of a vulnerability closed out of the 17 previously disclosed ... other security researchers have also identified an additional 20+ exposures on the site.' ... Kennedy said he was able to access 70,000 records within four minutes ... At the House Science and Technology Committee hearing held last week ... elite white hat hackers — Kevin Mitnick, Ed Skoudis, Chris Nickerson, Eric Smith, Chris Gates, John Strand, Kevin Johnson, and Scott White – blasted the website's insecurity. ... Mitnick, the 'world's most famous hacker' testified: '... It would be a hacker's wet dream to break into Healthcare.gov ... A breach may result in massive identity theft never seen before — these databases house information on every U.S. citizen! It's shameful the team that built the Healthcare.gov site implemented minimal, if any, security best practices.'"
Also, they had to know a priori this was going to be a *huge* target (no pun intended). Whether for the treasure trove of neatly collected data or a simple political agenda (doesn't even need to be a partisan one; lots of people who voted for Obama hate the ACA and healthcare.gov), it should have been obvious from the very beginning that the scrutiny of this site for security vulnerabilities would be far greater than most, and the costs (to the site developers) of an attacker exploiting one far more severe. Under those circumstances, business-as-usual things like PCI DSS and such should have looked like nothing. They should have hired an entire internal security team to oversee the development of the site starting from the design phase*, and an external penetration testing team to verify it at least once by now.
* Tacking security onto a design that is inherently insecure is expensive and often futile, just as is true of many other kinds of software bugs. Of course, if they'd designed competently in the first place, maybe the site wouldn't already be a laughingstock...
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
A mitigating start could be to outlaw the scam that is the credit reporting agencies in their current form.