ExtraTorrent- Healthcare.gov Suffered from DDoS Attack?

[Atreides]

Media reports speculate that the troubled Healthcare.gov website might have been hit by DDoS attack. Despite huge amounts of money spent on the website, it seems to remain plagued with problems since its launching on October 1st.

Recently security software provider Arbor Networks admitted there were rumors of a new DDoS attack crashing the US Internet healthcare exchange website, but had no idea why anyone would say that.

Well, a DDoS attack is supposed to be the sort of thing that the security experts were expecting and having lots of defenses in place to stop it. However, the company isn’t even sure that the attack is actually happening. The experts admitted that the attack in question was “unlikely to succeed in affecting the availability of the websiteâ€. Finally, the experts had recently found one tool designed to overload the webpage. It was written in Delphi and performed layer seven requests to get the healthcare.gov. It alternated between requesting https://www.healthcare.gov and https://www.healthcare.gov/contact-us, but the security specialists claimed that it was unlikely to work.

A research manager for Arbor Security believes that there were political motivations behind making the website appear under DDoS attack. They have seen website specific DDoS tools in the past related to topics of social or political interest. This application continues a trend the company is seeing with DDoS attacks being used as a means of retaliation against a policy, legal rulings or government actions.

Taking into account that Healthcare.gov might be just crashing anyway, it may happen so that those who want to see the whole Obama care are stirring up FUD that a DDoS attack will steal their information.