ObamaCare Website Creating Credit Concerns

While a battle rages over technical issues on the ObamaCare online marketplace, questions are emerging about the safety of data on the website.

Better Qualified CEO Paul Oster said the website is rife with security problems that can lead to identity theft and potentially wreck one’s credit if exploited.

“We have been flooded with calls by people that are concerned about the threat because what’s going to happen is it could take years before someone realizes that they became a victim of identity theft - and then they have to figure out was it in fact because of the information they provided through healthcare.gov?”

Oster added that most websites have the ability to "flash" users if they left the website they intended to be on and are now entering another domain, especially when clicking different icons on the page. But as of now, healthcare.gov lacks that function.

“It’s called ‘pharming’ and what happens is these hackers are able to redirect people when they’re clicking from one part of the site to the next and the person doesn’t realize that they left healthcare.gov. There are no triggers and alerts.”

But Bill Curtis, SVP & Chief Scientist at CAST, said this is not uncommon and other hacks have been reported that are much larger than the exposure on healthcare.gov, including the one revealed in July where five Eastern European men stole 160 million credit cards over the course of seven years.

There was also the TJX incident earlier this year, when the parent company of T.J. Maxx and Marshalls had 40 million credit card numbers stolen in what's believed to be one of the biggest such incidents in history.

“The TJX heist would be roughly the same size of the exposure if every uninsured American went to healthcare.gov and exposed their personal and credit card information.  So these types of security issues have already occurred at the same or even larger scale in industry."