McAfee: 'Bizarre' Healthcare.gov Doing 'Denial of Service Attack on Itself'

McAfee: 'Bizarre' Healthcare.gov Doing 'Denial of Service Attack on Itself'

John McAfee, founder of McAfee anti-virus software, told Gretchen Carlson of Fox News Thursday that the ObamaCare federal exchange website, Healthcare.gov, is effectively executing a “denial of service attack” on itself.

In computer technology, a “denial of service attack” is an attempt to make a network resource unavailable to its intended users. It is defined as a deliberately planned attack on a company or organization, websites, or servers. A denial of service attack aims to shut down access to a site or key server by flooding it with massive requests, placing such great demands on the targeted information infrastructure that no one else can gain access to it.

Asked by Carlson whether a decision to require consumers to actually register their personal information online rather than simply shop for health insurance could have caused the federal system’s “crash and burn,” McAfee responded, “I don’t think so. I think the crash and burn was caused by an inherent architecture.”

According to McAfee, the ObamaCare website’s design is such that “the way they divided the processing tasks, the user’s computer is used for over 50 programs. So, the transfer of data between the person logging on and the main servers is basically killing the system.”

“It’s basically doing a denial of service attack on itself. It is a very bizarre situation,” McAfee said. “Interesting, academically, but not very useful.”

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.