It appears the left has begun a campaign to blame the “right wing” and “Fox viewers” for the failure of the ObamaCare website.
Three weeks ago, leftists began circulating this video of a November 13th congressional hearing (see below) as “proof” the right is to blame for the ObamaCare website debacle. You may recall the Homeland Security Committee hearing was the first official confirmation of hacker attacks on the ObamaCare website. The meme claims this hearing confirms “right wingers” are behind the attacks. See the headline nearby.
But the video reveals no such thing.
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A friend of mine and, I thought, a reasonably intelligent lefty, recently put on my FB page this “story” about cyber attacks on the ObamaCare website that were “tied” to “right wing” groups. Here was his note (I’ve removed his name to save him embarrassment),
This was disturbing. …Cyber-attacks, well, I think if it were the Chinese, folks here would be demanding military action.
He sent me this “article” from the blogging platform, ‘The Examiner,’
Roberta Stempfley highlighted one successful attack that is designed to deny access to the website called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
Right wingers have been distributing the link to the necessary tools to perform the attacks on the Healthcare.gov website through social networking, as pointed out by Information Week, and other websites .
The name of the attack tool is called, “Destroy Obama Care!”
Aha! The name of the attack virus invokes the name ‘Obama Care’ therefore it must be right wingers behind it, right?
We go now to the alleged confirmation that “right wingers” are now “distributing the link to the necessary tools to perform the attacks on the Healthcare.gov website through social networking, as pointed out by Information Week, and other websites .” The “other websites” are this gem from a message board called Lunatic Outpost,
The message board nerd jumps to the conclusion that because the attack uses the name “Obama Care” that it is from the right wing. Contrary to this crank, I actually have proof that this is a bipartisan term.
Obamacare Then, Affordable Care Act Now | SuperCuts #21
The president’s signature health care law takes on an evolving name in the mouths of Democrats as it becomes increasingly unpopular.
The other ‘proof’ that right wingers have been distributing the link to the necessary tools to perform the attacks on the Healthcare.gov website…” claims it’s from Information Week. There is no confirmation in the Information Week article, but there is an observation that a similar kind of DDoS attack has been used by an Anonymous hacker–hardly connected to “right wing” “Fox viewers.” In fact, there is no mention of any political affiliation in the article.
Then we go to the website “Freak Out Nation” which is also listed as confirming the “right wing attack” on the ObamaCare website. Here’s the headline:
Right wingers are trying to sabotage the already problematic Healthcare.gov site but this time in the form of a DDoS attack and leaving a message which could easily be credited to a Fox News viewer.
The writer further posits that it must be right wingers because they use “Republican caps,” refer to the constitution, and have no misspellings in the DDos attack message. I’ll let you have fun with that one. Here’s the photo they use to confirm the DDos is a right wing message:
The message board crank also claims the right wing is distributing the code to disable the web page. He points to this article at Ihealthbeat.org as the purveyor of that claim. It says nothing of the sort. Indeed, it says the DDos that has been attempted stands little chance of bringing down the website,
In a blog post, Marc Eisenbarth, research manager at Arbor Networks, said that the “request rate, the non-distributed attack architecture and many other limitations make this tool unlikely to succeed in affecting the availability of the HealthCare.gov site.”However, Eisenbarth noted that the program “continues a trend (Arbor) is seeing with denial-of-service attacks being us
Seeing a pattern here? Finally, there’s the other “proof” that the attacks on the ObamaCare website are conclusively being done by right wingers because of this webpage which maps out the cyber attacks. Aha! We can track down the culprits, right? Uh, no.
The cyber attacks on Washington are being conducted by people outside of the country, or at least routing them outside the country. How anyone would know they’re “right wing” attacks is anybody’s guess. And it appears that’s all this is: a guess. Somebody’s trying to plant a story and depending on the ignorance of the readers. Seems like it’s working.
Now we hear from Talking Points Memo about a phony GOP website meant to hijack Covered California website goers. More on that next.