Denial of Service Attack on the Obamacare.gov Site

The right wing has had a whack at interference with the health care site, a denial of service attack.

from Arstechnia

"Researchers have uncovered software available on the Internet designed to overload the struggling Healthcare.gov website with more traffic than it can handle.

"ObamaCare is an affront to the Constitutional rights of the people," a screenshot from the tool, which was acquired by researchers at Arbor Networks, declares. "We HAVE the right to CIVIL disobedience!"

In a blog post published Thursday, Arbor researcher Marc Eisenbarth said there's no evidence Healthcare.gov has been subjected to any significant denial-of-service attacks since going live last month. He also said the limited request rate, the lack of significant distribution, and other features of the tool's underlying code made it unlikely that it could play a significant role in taking down the site. The tool is designed to put a strain on the site by repeatedly alternating requests to the https://www.healthcare.gov and https:www.healthcare.gov/contact-us addresses. If enough requests are made over a short period of time, it can overload some of the "layer 7" applications that the site relies on to make timely responses.

 We don't know who wrote this (Arstechnia offers the lame and unlikely possibility this might have been done by Obamacare supporters) but the far more plausible, credible explanation is that this was is what it claims to be, an attack on obamacare by those who do NOT support it.

Here's the thing -- acts like this are NOT civil disobedience, where the person who deliberately violates the law also does not resist arrest and punishment; they don't hide who they are. That is the key part that puts civil in civil disobedience.

More to the point, if this is the act of the inept and disgruntled, what about the actions that may be going undetected so far of the more competent and angry radical right?