NY Obamacare site bombarded by possible DDoS attack?
Posted by: Jon Ben-Mayor on 10/03/2013 08:47 AM
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If you tried to access the New York State of Health site these past few days you probably, like myself, were unable to navigate or pretty much do anything.
By comparison, the federal government’s heavily promoted HealthCare.gov site — a portal to the sites for all 50 states, the District of Columbia and America’s territories and commonwealths — drew just 4.7 million visitors the first day.
Late Tuesday, NY State of Health Executive Director Donna Frescatore said technicians were “looking into the cause of this abnormally high traffic.”
Darien Kindlund, manager of threat intelligence for the FireEye network-security company, said “the sheer volume” of visits to New York’s site pointed to a possible “distributed denial of service,” or DDoS attack, in which virus-infected computers bombard a site with traffic.
“The numbers are fairly compelling,” Kindlund said.
Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, another security firm, said that while there wasn’t yet enough evidence to prove an attack, “it does not take a lot of technical resources” and hackers can be hired to disrupt a site for just a couple thousand dollars a day.
“There have to be people who disagree with [ObamaCare] enough to do that,” he added.
Throughout the day, the Web site displayed a banner message telling users to return later.
By comparison, the federal government’s heavily promoted HealthCare.gov site — a portal to the sites for all 50 states, the District of Columbia and America’s territories and commonwealths — drew just 4.7 million visitors the first day.
Late Tuesday, NY State of Health Executive Director Donna Frescatore said technicians were “looking into the cause of this abnormally high traffic.”
Darien Kindlund, manager of threat intelligence for the FireEye network-security company, said “the sheer volume” of visits to New York’s site pointed to a possible “distributed denial of service,” or DDoS attack, in which virus-infected computers bombard a site with traffic.
“The numbers are fairly compelling,” Kindlund said.
Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, another security firm, said that while there wasn’t yet enough evidence to prove an attack, “it does not take a lot of technical resources” and hackers can be hired to disrupt a site for just a couple thousand dollars a day.
“There have to be people who disagree with [ObamaCare] enough to do that,” he added.
Throughout the day, the Web site displayed a banner message telling users to return later.
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