Obamacare Website Programed By Russians In Belarus - Malware Possible!

Photo: Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko with President

Vladimir Putin /AP

Bill Gertz is an outstanding reporter that has a knack for getting stories that nobody else can find. Apparently he could even have sources deep within  the NSA. This particular story wasn't suppose to get out. But Bill Gertz, who is with the Washington Free Beacon, got the inside scoop. Now we find out that the developers of the Obamacare website contracted with programmers in Belarus, formerly of the Soviet republic and a country known to be a hotbed for cyber criminals. The NSA has warned the department of Health and Human Services that the
Obamacare website is vulnerable to malware and security breaches beyond what was first anticipated. Here's the full story -
   

The Belarusian Connection

Obamacare network vulnerable to cyber attack
By: Bill Gertz, Washington Free Beacon
February 3, 2014 8:11 pm

U.S. intelligence agencies last week urged the Obama administration to check its new healthcare network for malicious software after learning that developers linked to the Belarus government helped produce the website, raising fresh concerns that private data posted by millions of Americans will be compromised.

The intelligence agencies notified the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency in charge of the Healthcare.gov network, about their concerns last week. Specifically, officials warned that programmers in Belarus, a former Soviet republic closely allied with Russia, were suspected of inserting malicious code that could be used for cyber attacks, according to U.S. officials familiar with the concerns.

Video Update:: Bill Gertz on 'Fox And Friends'

The software links the millions of Americans who signed up for Obamacare to the federal government and more than 300 medical institutions and healthcare providers.

“The U.S. Affordable Care Act software was written in part in Belarus by software developers under state control, and that makes the software a potential target for cyber attacks,” one official said.

Cyber security officials said the potential threat to the U.S. healthcare data is compounded by what they said was an Internet data “hijacking” last year involving Belarusian state-controlled networks. The month-long diversion covertly rerouted massive amounts of U.S. Internet traffic to Belarus—a repressive dictatorship located between Russia, Poland, and Ukraine.

“Belarusian President [Alexander] Lukashenko’s authoritarian regime is closely allied with Russia and is adversarial toward the United States,” the official added.

The combination of the Belarus-origin software, the Internet re-routing, and the anti-U.S. posture of the Belarusian government “makes the software written in Belarus a potential target of cyber attacks for identity theft and privacy violations” of Americans, the official said.

Security officials urged HHS to immediately ... Contine >>> 


About Bill Gertz
Bill Gertz is senior editor of the Washington Free Beacon. Prior to joining the Beacon he was a national security reporter, editor, and columnist for 27 years at the Washington Times. Bill is the author of six books, four of which were national bestsellers. His most recent book was The Failure Factory, a look at an out-of-control government bureaucracy that could have been a primer for the Tea Party. Bill has an international reputation. Vyachaslav Trubnikov, head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, once called him a “tool of the CIA” after he wrote an article exposing Russian intelligence operations in the Balkans. A senior CIA official once threatened to have a cruise missile fired at his desk after he wrote a column critical of the CIA’s analysis of China. And China’s communist government has criticized him for news reports exposing China’s weapons and missile sales to rogues states. The state-run Xinhua news agency in 2006 identified Bill as the No. 1 “anti-China expert” in the world. Bill insists he is very much pro-China—pro-Chinese people and opposed to the communist system. Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld once told him: “You are drilling holes in the Pentagon and sucking out information.”

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