Free Republic

The Obamacare website has more than annoying bugs. A cybersecurity expert has found a way to hack into users' accounts. Until the Department of Health fixed the security hole last week, anyone could easily reset your Healthcare.gov password without your knowledge and potentially hijack your account. The glitch was discovered last week by Ben Simo, a software tester in Arizona. Simo found that gaining access to people's accounts was frighteningly simple:

There is good news and bad news regarding Healthcare.gov. The good news is that despite the systemic failure infecting much of the site, there is one essential component — the federal data hub — that is working as it was designed. The data hub links federal-agency records together to determine whether an applicant for health insurance is eligible for subsidies. The bad news is that because the data hub is the largest consolidation of personal data in our nation’s history, it will become a magnet for identity thieves. This isn’t idle speculation or fearmongering. Michael Astrue, who was commissioner of...

NORFOLK Two former Sentara Healthcare nurse's aides improperly accessed the personal information of about 3,700 patients as part of an elaborate identity theft scheme that netted more than $116,000, according to hospital officials. Sentara Healthcare's chief privacy officer, Greg Burkhart, announced the scope of the data breach Friday after the second of the two men pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to conspiracy to defraud the government. Although court documents indicate fewer than 250 people fell victim to the scheme, Burkhart said federal investigators have forwarded to the hospital evidence the two men had information on thousands of patients. "We...

A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), provided exclusively to Breitbart News ahead of its release, seeks to counter the talking point that America’s at least 11 million illegal immigrants are “otherwise law-abiding.” The 21-page report, titled “The Myth of the ‘Otherwise Law-Abiding’ Illegal Alien,” analyzes which key laws the authors allege illegal immigrants regularly break and other illegal activity they purportedly engage in on a frequent basis. “For years advocates of amnesty and high levels of immigration have described the illegal alien population as one made up of ‘otherwise law-abiding’ people who have committed no violation...

http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/10/04/John-McAfee-On-Obamacare-Tech-People-Will-Lose-Millions-of-Dollars

Oh, it’s seriously bad. Somebody made a grave error, not in designing the program but in simply implementing the web aspect of it. 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. Instead, any hacker can put a website up, make it look extremely competitive, and because of the nature of the system — this is health care, after all —...

An employee of Minnesota’s Obamacare exchange, MNsure, sent an unencrypted file to the wrong person and left 2,400 people’s private information at the mercy of a nearby insurance agent. One exchange staffer’s simple mistake gave insurance broker Jim Koester access to an Excel document of Social Security numbers, names, addresses and other personal data for whole a list of insurance agents. Luckily for the 2,400, Koester was cooperative — and unnerved. “The more I thought about it, the more troubled I was,” Koester told the Minnesota Star Tribune. “What if this had fallen into the wrong hands? It’s scary. If...

A service that sells personal data to identity thieves has been getting its wares from hacked data brokers storing information similar to what Obamacare marketplaces plan to use, setting the scene for fraudsters to collect government subsidies. According to a new investigative report by cybersecurity researcher Brian Krebs, the service, known as SSNDOB, hacked LexisNexis and other large data aggregators that supply ID check information.

..."Some navigator participants plan to engage in enrollment activities that increase the likelihood of fraud or abuse, including door-to-door contacts." ... “The recipient of one of the largest Navigator grants explained in their application that they expected a substantial portion of their program to involve door-to-door contacts,” ... “Another described their work plan as involving ‘door-to-door outreach to 10,000 households per week"

Oh, did we say Obamacare required 30 weeks of training for its “navigators”? We really meant 20: Opening day for the new health-insurance marketplaces is two months away, but efforts to recruit and train workers to help people enroll are barely off the ground in many states. With time running short before enrollment kicks off Oct. 1, the Obama administration last week cut back on training requirements for these ‘navigators.’ Officials were concerned there might not be enough time to do more-extensive training before the health-insurance exchanges open … Three weeks ago, the administration said navigators would need up to...

Today's high-end televisions are almost all equipped with "smart" PC-like features, including Internet connectivity, apps, microphones and cameras. But a recently discovered security hole in some Samsung Smart TVs shows that many of those bells and whistles aren't ready for prime time. The flaws in Samsung Smart TVs, which have now been patched, enabled hackers to remotely turn on the TVs' built-in cameras without leaving any trace of it on the screen. While you're watching TV, a hacker anywhere around the world could have been watching you. Hackers also could have easily rerouted an unsuspecting user to a malicious website...

For nearly a decade, a band of cybercriminals rampaged through the servers of a global business who's who: Among the victims were 7-Eleven, Dow Jones, Nasdaq, JetBlue and JC Penney. Prosecutors say the hackers stole "conservatively" 160 million credit card numbers, and the dollar value of the crimes they helped facilitate is enormous — just four of the victims are out $300 million. The suffering caused to identity theft victims was "immeasurable," say prosecutors. On Thursday, five of the gang's members were indicted. One is in custody in the U.S., a second is awaiting extradition in the Netherlands, and three...

A mother of three, who taunted authorities to catch her as she stole about $20 million from the IRS, has been jailed for 21 years. Rashia Wilson, who pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft earlier this year, admitted to stealing more than $3 million but the figure is believed to be much higher. Tampa police were first alerted to the fraud in 2010 when they noticed a drop in drug dealing in the area.

The Interior Ministry has announced that Israel’s biometric database program will officially begin in two weeks. That’s when the government will start building a biometric database of all Israeli citizens by upgrading the folded blue plastic ID cards (“teudat zehut”) and other non-citizen Ids with fingerprints and facial recognition data. Not everyone is happy about this plan. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) expressed outrage in a statement by spokesman Marc Grey, who warned, “The police could use this information in all kinds of ways to avoid their constitutional responsibilities of due process – and then you have...

http://twitchy.com/2013/07/01/future-lawsuit-cnn-broadcasts-george-zimmermans-social-security-number/?utm_source=autotweet&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=twitter

Forgive the original post, please, but there is something that keeps bothering me that I just need to vent. In all this scandal news surrounding the IRS, all the hours and hours of televised commentary about it, I have never once heard anybody mention the recent (and ongoing) scandal involving Identity Theft at the IRS. Not only have tens of thousands of people had their identities stolen via the use by others of their social security numbers to file returns . . . I am a victim, myself . . . but, it is also the case that billions of...

Despite failing in courts across the country, Plaintiffs have continued to file lawsuits alleging that President Obama is ineligible to serve as the American President because he is not a natural born U.S. citizen. However, as set forth above, federal courts cannot grant Plaintiffs the relief sought because the issues which Plaintiffs raise in their pleadings are constitutionally committed to the jurisdiction of another branch of the federal government. If Plaintiffs believe that President Obama has violated the law, their remedy is to alert Congress to the alleged wrongdoing. Congress could then initiate impeachment proceedings with the aid of an...

As gratifying as it was to see the “news” media actually do its job last week when the IRS scandal broke, it was also odd that the coverage focused exclusively on abuses of power relating to various Tea Party and anti-abortion groups. A much scarier IRS story has been virtually ignored by the establishment press. On Wednesday, it was reported that a class-action lawsuit had been filed against a group of IRS agents who, according to the complaint filed by “John Doe Company” in the Southern District of California, “stole more than 60,000,000 medical records of more than 10,000,000 Americans,...

WASHINGTON, - Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts told a Maryland coffee shop cashier he was the victim of credit card information theft. Roberts, who normally pays for his morning coffee with a credit card, paid with cash Tuesday and explained to the cashier that he had been forced to cancel his credit card when someone was able to obtain his numbers, The Washington Post reported Friday.

A woman who lives on Stargazer Street here has been arrested for using the stolen identity of an Arizona woman, police said. Elena Baltazar Bartolo, 29, was arrested on Monday by Cookeville Police Officer Jeremy Lintz. She is charged with identity theft, a Class D felony. According to sources and a warrant on file in the case, an Arizona woman named Petra Fernandez recently learned that someone had stolen her identity, and an investigation revealed that the thief was living and working in the Cookeville area. Allegedly, Bartolo had been using Fernandez’s identity since 2004 and has been working at...