It was only a matter of time .... http://finance.yahoo.com/news/hacker-breached-healthcare-gov-insurance-site-205151523.html
Considering the entire purpose of uploading malicious software to a server is to normally to take data from the server, I have difficulty believing that healthcare consumer data was not taken in this situation. Normally once the malware is uploaded to your server then it is too late to stop the theft of privileged information.
Foreigners hacked Obamacare website on July 8th - but HHS only discovered it 10 days ago http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-days-ago-claims-no-consumer-data-stolen.html It's is difficult to believe that the HHS can claim that no customer data was stolen when they did not even discover the hack for many weeks. It appears they had no monitoring systems in place for discovering file changes on their server (a standard thing to do). I expect that they also had no Firewall or IPS functionality in place that would determine if customer data was being downloaded out of the system either. That the HHS is claiming no customer data was stolen is absurd, the reality is that they have no clue if customer data was stolen or not I very much doubt the HHS explanation from "Tavenner's agency revealed that malicious code inserted by the hackers was still dormant when technicians discovered it on August 25." I expect they found the initial uploader malware only that is used as a controller to upload other malware and to implement DDOS attacks. I expect (as in most cases) the other malware used to download customer data was deleted after the task was completed and the uploader malware was left in place in case they ever wanted to break into the server again. But considering that the HHS was no respectable security measures in place on the Obamacare site, we will never really know what was compromised. Now there is a dispute if this compromised server was only a staging server used for testing, or a server associated with the active website. If this compromised server was only used for testing with no access to real customer records then this entire situation is less of an issue.
Near the end of the article ... A senior Homeland Security official told the Journal that 'if this happened anywhere other than Healthcare.gov, it wouldn't be news' – a chilling suggestion that government servers are vulnerable more frequently than Americans know. That spokesperson is an idiot! It should be news. Wasn't it news when Target was hacked? What about PF Chang? UPS stores just 2 weeks ago. How about Nieman Marcus? The list goes on and on and most every time it is news that is reported.
Ted Cruz’s Obamacare Nightmare Comes to Life By Jonathan ChaitFollow @jonathanchait In the summer of 2013, with the Affordable Care Act about to begin enrolling its first customers in the new health-care exchanges, Ted Cruz warned Republicans that they were facing one final chance to kill the law. Once Americans had grown accustomed to the sweet comfort of affordable health insurance, Cruz foresaw, they would never give it up: “[Obama’s] strategy is to get as many Americans as possible hooked on the subsidies, addicted to the sugar. If we get to Jan. 1, this thing is here forever.” Cruz may have been completely misguided in his belief that this logic dictated that Republicans instigate a government shutdown, but on the political economy of Obamacare, he was completely right. Indications of Cruz’s prescience are popping up everywhere. In Kentucky, Mitch McConnell — who had vowed publicly and privately to “repeal this monstrosity” — was asked whether he would repeal the insurance exchange in his own state, and replied with word salad (“I think that’s unconnected to my comments about the overall question here”). When asked about repealing his state’s Medicaid expansion, he replied, “I don’t know that it will be taken away from them.” Unpopular Pennsylvania Republican Governor Tom Corbett recently agreed to accept Medicaid expansion. Four more Republican governors — in Tennessee, Utah, Indiana, and Wyoming — have taken steps toward following suit. In Washington, the river of attacks against Obamacare issuing from Republicans has slowed to a trickle. (The number of Congressional news releases attacking the law has fallen by 75 percent this summer from last.) The Weekly Standard’s Jeffrey Anderson is warning darkly of an “anti-repeal wing” within the party. “Root and branch repeal is starting to look more like twig and leaf,” concedes Reason’s Peter Suderman. As the law shocked detractors last spring by exceeding its enrollment targets, the anti-Obamacare community fixated on a final hope: that consumers looking to enroll this fall for next year would encounter soaring premiums. Not only has the hoped-for premium shock failed to materialize, rates seem to be coming in actually lower than this year. In a market where annual large price hikes have occurred for decades, the result is almost unfathomably positive. A more telling development may be a behind-the-scenes fight within the Republican Party over a simple message vote. This National Review editorial, which is an attempt to persuade Congressional Republicans to stiffen their anti-Obamacare spines, contains the only reporting I’ve seen about this episode. The subject of the fight is a prospective Republican bill to repeal something called “risk corridors,” which are a temporary program to balance out the actuarial risk insurance companies face. If an insurer turns out to enroll disproportionately healthy customers, the risk corridors force them to pay back some of their profit to the government; if their consumers turn out to be disproportionately sick, they get money back from the government. Risk corridors are based on a similar program created by George W. Bush’s Medicare expansion, which was uncontroversial then and now. Since it’s part of Obamacare, conservatives have attacked it as a sinister corporate plot. Last year, Republicans learned of its existence and started calling the program an “Obamacare bailout” and demanding its repeal. Aside from the merits of the case against risk corridors, which are extremely weak, the fascinating thing is that Republicans in Congress are now encountering resistance to attacking the “Obamacare bailout” from their own party. “Some Republicans say that the insurance companies should not be penalized for the defects of the law,” comments the frustrated conservative magazine. “The balkers also raise the worry that Democrats would accuse them of trying to cause premiums to increase.” All this is a way of saying that Republicans in Congress worry about passing bills that would harm consumers and companies that are participating in Obamacare. The repeal of risk corridors is, of course, just a “message bill” — President Obama obviously would not sign it — which makes the reluctance all the more telling. Vulnerable Republicans have calculated that the message no longer helps them. It mobilizes more potential victims against them than it mobilizes potential anti-Obamacare voters. National Review’s editorial concludes, “If Republicans aren’t willing to break with the insurers over this issue, then in what sense do they oppose Obamacare?” The Republican crusade against Obamacare is not ending; rather, it is shrinking and mutating. The party base will demand a presidential nominee who promises to repeal the hated law, just as it did in 2012. But the next Republican candidate will be running in an environment where repealing the law would create millions and millions of now-identifiable victims. Since the start of the year, Obamacare has gone from a weakness Republicans were salivating at the chance to exploit to an issue they no longer want to talk about. Two years from now, matters could be worse still. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/ted-cruzs-obamacare-nightmare-comes-to-life.html
Reminded me of something I read this morning: A Republican strategist once said that if electoral politics is a game of getting to 50 percent plus one—that is, you need half of the voters plus one more to win an election—what Democrats do is assume they start with 0 percent support and try to win over women voters plus black voters plus working-class white voters and hope the total rises above 50 percent. Whereas Republicans begin by assuming that 100 percent of the voters are with them and act accordingly—and then hope that, come Election Day, they haven’t alienated more than 49 percent. This has always struck me as both accurate and profound. Despite being extremely out of step with the vast majority of American voters today (not to mention the even greater majority of voters of the future), Republicans continue to push their extremist agenda with an evangelism that is breathtakingly audacious. And meanwhile Democrats, including progressive Democrats, worry they have to prioritize among their core issues despite having all the wind of electoral demography and opinion polling at our backs. Sally Kohn
I've argued before that the manifest differences between liberal and conservative all go back to core ontological differences. Is Man's true nature more individual or social? Is Man basically good, or evil? Is change ordinarily good, or bad? Since these questions are answered, like the question of light's "true" nature, in accordance with the instrument observing them, they cannot ultimately be answered, not with finality. So in that sense, I believe progressives and conservatives, liberals and libertarians, democrats and republicans, Labor and Capital, and so on, will be with us forever. Even more, I believe it essential these viewpoints are always represented--they are sides on the same coin, elimination of one is destruction of all.