How factual are Mr.McAfee’s claims about the ObamaCare website.
His claims are here----> A hackers wet dreams
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 brokers, the examiners for all of the states and pick and choose one.’”
“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 retired 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’m not able to watch the video at the moment, so I’m just going by the quotes in the text. His central objection seems to be the possibility that criminals could set up phishing sites to lure people into providing identity and financial information. This is a problem faced by the financial industry and others. This is not an Obamacare problem. It’s a problem of clever con artists tricking people into thinking they are on legitimate sites when they are not. If someone falls for a phishing scam, it is certainly possible for that person to lose huge amounts of money. But again this is a criminal problem that’s existed for a long time. The opening of the exchanges does give criminals a new ploy to use in their scams, but saying that millions of people will fall victim to these scams is kind of hysterical.
Also, McAfee says, “There should be one website, run by the government, you go to that website and then you can click on all of the agencies.” Uh, there is. Healthcare.gov.
He may be referring to the navigators (scroll way down) funded by the program – people and organizations tasked with helping people sign up for coverage. Apparently HHS will not be keeping a list of the official navigators or providing them with an ID, so people may have some difficulty distinguishing real ones from fakes.
Healthcare.gov directs people to various insurance providers. McAfee is concerned hackers could put up phishing sites and use Healthcare.gov to drive traffic to them.
I haven’t looked at Healthcare.gov. But what McAfee is suggesting is possible. It’s a security issue they should have designed for.