A tech-security expert said that despite this weekend’s HealthCare.gov relaunch, the threat and risk potential to personal data from the Obamacare website is “still limitless on Nov. 30.”
Morgan Wright — one of a handful of cybersecurity analysts to testify before Congress on HealthCare.gov’s utter lack of security safeguards in earlier this month — warned Gregg Jarrett on Fox News Saturday that the Obamacare website was still an easy target for hackers trying to steal citizens’ Social Security and financial data.
“That was our opinion that day during Congress,” he said, “and actually, Greg, even in their own words — one of the memorandums issued by CMS [the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services], by the CIO who signed off on the authorization, signed off on a finding that ‘the threat and risk potential is limitless’ and gave CMS until May 31, 2014 to fix it.”
“Right now, that threat and risk potential is still limitless on Nov. 30,” Wright asserted.
Jarrett wondered how the Obama administration botched the website rollout so badly:
JARRETT: How can this be, Morgan? I mean, with all the money that was spent on this thing, taxpayer money, how could it be that this thing is so flawed?
WRIGHT: Greg, I would say two things. No. 1, they had “Go Fever.” This is the lesson they learned from the Challenger launch — the O rings. People were so fixed on a date, this thing was going to launch no matter what.
And I think the second problem is lack of accountability and leadership. No one person was in overall charge of this project. In other words, they waited to put a captain on the ship until after the Titanic had hit an iceberg. That’s not the time when you need a captain. You’ve got to have somebody there before with responsibility, accountability and authority to make changes, and there were too many turf battles going on for that to happen.
JARRETT: They didn’t have the bandwidth to handle the demand and now they’re bragging “Oh, gee, 50,000 people will be able to get on to the website at one time.” 50,000! Come on, man — there are 48 million uninsured Americans.
WRIGHT: Put it in perspective: HealthCare.gov has 500 million lines of code and they say maybe they can handle 50,000 people. Facebook has only 20 million lines of code and they handle 727 million daily active users. You can do the math.