A team of hackers have designed a new program to take down the already struggling Obamacare website.
Researchers recently discovered a new hacking tool called “Destroy Obamacare” designed to overload and crash HealthCare.gov, reports the Christian Science Monitor.
“This program continually displays alternate page of the ObamaCare website. It has no virus, Trojans, worms, or cookies….You can open as many copies of this program as you want. Each copy opens multiple links to the site,” explains the Destroy Obamacare site.
If the designers did not make the purpose of their hacking tool clear by its name, then the website where the program can be downloaded clears up any confusion.
The website reads, “ObamaCare is an affront to the Constitutional rights of the people.” It adds, “We HAVE the right to CIVIL disobedience!”
The hackers aim to overload the site and knock it offline.
“The purpose is to overload the ObamaCare website, to deny serivce [sic] to users and perhaps overload and crash the system,” they claim.
This sort of tool is categorized as a distributed denial-of-service attack and it is frequently used to correct perceived political wrongdoings, Marc Eisenbarth, research manager at DDoS defense firm Arbor Networks wrote in a blog post.
“This application continues a trend [Arbor] is seeing with denial-of-service attacks being used as a means of retaliation against a policy, legal rulings or government actions,” he wrote.
At the moment, “Destroy Obamacare” might be too rudimentary to inflict any major damage on the HealthCare.gov website, says Eisenbarth.
“The request rate, the non-distributed attack architecture and many other limitations make this tool unlikely to succeed in affecting the availability of the healthcare.gov site,” he said, adding that he had not seen any “active use of this software.”
However, HealthCare.gov has been struggling to handle the site’s small pool of visitors ever since it launched even without being attacked by “Destroy Obamacare.”
The White House promised that website’s problems would be fixed be the end of the month, but now officials with knowledge of the project predict that they will not meet the November deadline.
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