Belarus is a puppet regime of Russia, today’s neo-Soviet Union. Cyber attack units and other state-sponsored units of terrorism are outsourced here (among other neighboring countries), in order to keep blame off the Soviet regime. As we see from a previous post, nuclear weapons might get the green light to be stored there, as in the past. One can only wonder why Belerusians were sourced in the development of ACA software. They might have planted an ability to shut down hospitals in the futue.
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.
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.
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“Belarusian President [Alexander] Lukashenko’s authoritarian regime is closely allied with Russia and is adversarial toward the United States,” the official added.
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The officials also recommended that HHS use security specialists not related to software vendors for the inspections to reduce further risks.
Officials disclosed the software compromise last week after the discovery in early January of statements by Belarusian official Valery Tsepkalo, director of the government-backed High-Technology Park (HTP) in Minsk.
Tsepkalo told a Russian radio station in an interview broadcast last summer that HHS is “one of our clients,” and that “we are helping Obama complete his insurance reform.”
“Our programmers wrote the program that appears on the monitors in all hospitals and all insurance companies—they will see the full profile of the given patient,” Tsepkalo said June 25 on Voice of Russia Radio.
White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said an intelligence report on the Belarusian software was “recalled by the intelligence community shortly after it was issued.”
The report has prompted HHS to conduct a review to determine if software related to the Affordable Care Act “was written by Belarusian software developers,” she said.
Full article: The Belarusian Connection (Washington Free Beacon)
Global Geopolitics 