Posted on 11/04/2013 10:30:29 PM PST by Lmo56
CBS News) WASHINGTON -- The health care website went down again Monday for an hour and a half, and no one is sure why. It's being taken offline on purpose every night from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. for repairs. Millions are still having trouble buying insurance on it, and it turns out that even when the website works, it may not be secure enough to protect privacy.
As HealthCare.gov was being developed, crucial tests to ensure the security and privacy of customer information fell behind schedule.
CBS News analysis found that the deadline for final security plans slipped three times from May 6 to July 16. Security assessments to be finished June 7 slid to August 16 and then August 23. The final, required top-to-bottom security tests never got done.
The House Oversight Committee released an Obama administration memo that shows four days before the launch, the government took an unusual step. It granted itself a waiver to launch the website with "a level of uncertainty ... deemed as a high (security) risk."
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
We got a Fall Guy winner - Marilyn Tavenner !!!
I work for a financial company, and we spend a lot of time dealing with paperwork and record-keeping for SOX audits, and we have to hire an independant auditor EVERY year. The record keeping for just adding a user and assigning rights to the network more than doubles the time it takes to actually add the user. We've got at least 3 full time employees who do NOTHING but SOX compliance throughout the year!
Mark
I work in IT ...
Despite the legal ramifications - the CMS had ethical considerations to adhere to. The fact that there was even a SMALL chance of compromising system integrity should have been enough to halt the rollout in its tracks ...
The waiver was approved by an ignorant, incompetent boob of a bureaucrat ...
They shoulda done it the way that they did the Manhattan Project. They selected an EXCELLENT Project Manager, General Leslie Groves, who managed the building of the Pentagon [on time AND under budget]. He then had Robert Oppenheimer oversee the technical work of the project ...
The only free time I have is between 1-5 am.
How am I ever gonna sign up?
Wait....I’ll be asleep.
A down website is pretty secure. It’s during those infrequent intervals that the thing is up that the problems start.
I had a “background check” online, before they would let me take the training and tests.
They asked me what my previous address had been, and gave me about 20 choices.
The ONLY address that I recognized was that of my Ex-Wife.
I have NEVER lived there.
The system approved me when I checked that address.
That’s another thing. The daily shutdowns tell me that they don’t even fully understand what the scope of the problem really is. They are watching the site struggle through a period of time, identifying the top 10 or 20 problems, shutting it down, throwing a quick and dirty fix at it, and bringing it back up to identify (hopefully) the next 10 or 20 biggest problems.
They’ve already thrown one major design change in; prices before subsidies. It simplified things, but what the hell else is out there.
It’s insane. It’s non-existent cycle time. it tells me they’re pretty terrified of what they’re looking at.
Trouble with on-the-fly changes is that NO end-to-end regression testing is being performed as they make changes to the code.
Regression testing is required for ALL functionality, even if you change ONE character in code. Things that worked BEFORE you made the change may NOT work now, the change you made to correct a certain problem may NOT work, and you may have introduced NEW problems. That is why you need to regression test end-to-end ...
The system approved me when I checked that address.
Part of the authentication process is to get info from one of the credit reporting agencies. A past address listed on one of the agency reports, had me living at my brother's father-in-law address.
The same thing happened to me except it was the address my daughter lived for a while after she left home to strike out on her own.
I’m glad to see CBS doing these reports. Question is: are enough people watching to realize how bad Obamacare is?
And does this report make the contractor the fall guy, instead of the Democrats?
Instead, they hired the American subsidiary of a Canadian company that, IIRC, was fired TWICE by the Canadian government, for gross incompetence, the inability to deliver a working system, and cost overruns that I believe were several orders of magnitude on the gun registration. But I suppose their #1 qualification was that the people in charge of the company were buddies of the Angry Wookie.
Mark
You're right, but as usual, the ministry of propaganda focuses on the LEAST of the problems, the web site itself, since that's all they can understand.
The web site itself is nothing, other than an interface to the underlying programs that are supposed to process and store your data. Adding encryption to hide the data being transmitted isn't a big deal. The real problem is the security of the "back end," and it appears that it's really got problems. There are reports of a lawyer being contacted by someone in a different state, who after logging on, downloaded private data and information of the lawyer. And we've heard of insurance companies getting customer information that is incorrect, or multiple instance of the information. Those are indications of a total database query, storage, and indexing problems, as well as a total failure of data security. This is NOT something that can be "patched." It indicates a total failure of system architecture and design.
Mark
Well,the fact is that, thanks to the Angry Wookie, HHS hired a contractor with a proven history of failure, the inability to deliver a working product, and unbelievably HUGE cost overruns that would embarrass any DoD contractor! So the contractor DOES deserve SOME of the blame.
But the REAL blame does belong with those in charge, but it will never happen. I'll bet dollars to donuts that the blame will be placed on the pubbies, who opposed ObamaCare from the start, and the ministry of propaganda will joyfully report it, over and over again!
Mark
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