Right wing cyber attacks on Healthcare.gov website confirmed

[jtuck004]

109. Awww, I'm just irritated by the whole thing. Bunches of people seem to want to grasp at anything and

everything to find excuses for this instead of looking at where the real issue is and getting it fixed. Excuses don't fix anything. You had a legitimate question and I shouldn't get so snippy.

What I meant to say in my inept writing is that thousands upon thousands of legitimate requests (from the computer's point of view) could do a similar thing, take up system resources which would deny those services to others if the systems are not designed well (and that sure appears to be the case). But that's a a design problem, not having systems that should be able to handle the load - because that WAS the predicted legitimate load, if several million people were expected to sign up. It should have been designed to handle that with room to spare. It would likely take hundreds of thousands to make a real difference, and even then it should at most slow, not disable the site. Repeated IP addresses would have been flagged fairly quickly, and they probably don't control enough machines to really make a dent anyway. And just because they found a script that someone named "take down the site" doesn't say it was used, or effective, or anything else. There was a lot of inference in that story, not much of anything substantial. I could name my dog "flew to the moon", but it doesn't mean he did it. Sounds more like people trying to offer up excuses, in the hopes that something will divert attention from the real issue.

But what seems to be missing is the idea that the sites sit behind a network of really good security people that would nip that in the bud so fast it would make a person's head spin. So a lot of this speculation ignores reality.

I'm a sysadmin type - I admire the work most programmers do, but I never had the patience to argue for hours about the most elegant way to create a method, ya' know? I'm expected to get things working and keep them that way, not make excuses, and I have a hundred other fires to put out after the one I'm currently working on. So I have to cut to the problem, figure out WHY it's a problem, do my best to understand the why of the engineering, and make a good, solid fix across lots of different systems. It may not be elegant, but it works. I'm not always right, but I'm good at what I do and I'm right most of the time. I am always fixing things for people who get in their own way by insisting on creating demons that don't exist, or looking for things that "should be". They need to focus on "what is", and it is just hard for them to do.

This was/is a really important program, but I think inept management at several levels left us with a pile of crap, not realizing the work that needed to be done while either patting themselves on the back for doing a good job or thinking that they could shove the responsibility off on someone else. (And having worked on government projects that's not unusual. I can certainly picture that happening in D.C.). There were pressures from outside, but that doesn't really excuse this, and it doesn't get it fixed. The sooner people quit letting all the ancillary stuff that has little or nothing to do with it get in the way the sooner a solution will begin to emerge.

I was reading about it in the NY TImes. Some of the folks working on it said there were a few more people, but not much had changed, except that there were a "lot more suits walking around" (most of whom are probably not useful). A computer scientist commented on what it was going to take to fix it, and noting all the new experts that had been called in, said something to the effect of "Just because you get 9 women together doesn't mean you can have a baby in a month". And now we are hearing lengthening promises of when it will be ready. So we will see...

I'm seriously wondering if there are parts of this that were never really tested or working, just because the project managers never fully developed the requirements and outcomes. Wouldn't surprise me.