Right-Wing Is Using Cyber-Attacks To Damage The Obamacare Website

(The image above is by ALAMY on the website of The Telegraph.)

It is no secret that the roll-out of the federal health insurance exchange has had some significant problems, mainly because the website created to help citizens purchase insurance was not ready on the opening date. It has been unable to handle the volume of traffic it has gotten, because the site was put into operation before all the "glitches" were worked out. This should not have happened, but the site is being fixed and should be able to work as expected very soon.

That is, it should be working right soon if the right-wingers allow that to happen. They don't want Obamacare to work, and congressional Republicans have been making a big deal out of the problems with the health care exchange. They claim it is indicative of the entire program being unworkable. But now their is evidence that right-wingers are using cyber-attacks to make sure the system does not work right (even after the glitches are worked out).

Roberta Stempfley, acting assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, says that at least 16 different kinds of cyber-attacks have been directed at the Obamacare website. One of the most successful so far has been a DDoS attacks. Here is how examiner.com describes it:

A DDoS attack is designed to make a network unavailable to intended users, generally through a concerted effort to disrupt service such as repeatedly accessing the servers, saturating them with more traffic than the website is designed to handle.

Right wingers have been distributing the link to the necessary tools to perform the attacks on the Healthcare.gov website through social networking, as pointed out by Information Week, and other websites.

"Destroy Obama Care!", that's the advertised name given to the attack tool by "right wing patriots" who are distributing the DDoS tool through downloads on social networks, which promises to overwhelm the Healthcare.gov website.

"This program continually displays alternate page of the ObamaCare website. It has no virus, Trojans, worms, or cookies. The purpose is to overload the ObamaCare website, to deny service to users and perhaps overload and crash the system," reads the program's grammar- and spelling-challenged "about" screen. "You can open as many copies of this program as you want. Each copy opens multiple links to the site."

I can understand the GOP attacks regarding the inability of the Obamacare website to function as it was supposed to. The site should have been ready before being rolled out. But the right-wing attacks are subtracting from the legitimacy of the Republican arguments. If your followers are cyber-attacking the website to keep it from working, then it is stupid and wrong to keep blaming the Obama administration for the website's problems.

Why isn't the mainstream media making this a big story? They have incessantly reported the problems of the website, but now that it's being fixed, why aren't they reporting the right-wing attacks to damage it and keep it from working. This should be at least as big a story, especially since these cyber-attacks are designed to keep American citizens from purchasing needed health insurance at a lower (or even free) price. It's just mean-spirited and wrong to deny health insurance to Americans, and then try to blame it on someone else.