Obamacare launch spawns 700+ cyber-squatters capitalizing on Healthcare.gov, state exchanges

Obamacare launch spawns 700+ cyber-squatters capitalizing on Healthcare.gov, state exchanges

What a mess!

This is what happens when people blindly trust government to work.

Washington Examiner reports More than 700 websites have been created with names playing off of Obamacare or Healthcare.gov, making it likely that some cyber squatterAmericans will mistakenly hand over private information to unknown third-parties.

For instance, there is a website – www.obama-care.us – that brands itself as part of the “Obamacare enrollment team,” directs people to an “Obamacare enrollment form” and asks users for their name, address, Social Security number and other contact information. According to a counter at the bottom of the page, more than 3,000 people have visited obama-care.us.

This website does not actually enable people to enroll in Obamacare. It was registered with GoDaddy.com on Sept. 2 – less than a month before the official launch of the health care exchange websites – according to who.is, a website that provides information on internet domains and their owners.

The practice of setting up websites with names that are similar to high-profile pages is known as cyber-squatting.

It can be used by private businesses looking to siphon traffic away from their competitors, by marketers selling ads to private companies – by visiting a website, you’re revealing your interest in a given product – or by identity thieves.

“[Obama-care.us] is so well deceptively designed that I had to research the owner to verify that it wasn’t a government site,” said a retired cybersecurity industry expert.

“It is owned by a company named ‘Property Systems of Georgia,’ and they own 167 other squatter sites,” the expert said.

More here

Don’t worry I’m sure Obama’s Tech A team will clean all this up.

 

Originally posted at The Last Tradition

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