Is Obamacare breeding cyber-attacks?

Talk of unintended consequences. Apparently, the anger over Obama’s healtchare reform has boosted the market for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks! Proofpoint, an email security firm, scrutinizes a chain email making rounds on the Internet. Entitled "Here you can buy DDOS", the email is brief & eloquent: “If you don’t like Obama, come here; you can ...

Talk of unintended consequences. Apparently, the anger over Obama's healtchare reform has boosted the market for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks! Proofpoint, an email security firm, scrutinizes a chain email making rounds on the Internet. Entitled "Here you can buy DDOS", the email is brief & eloquent: “If you don't like Obama, come here; you can help to DDOS his site with your installs”.

Talk of unintended consequences. Apparently, the anger over Obama’s healtchare reform has boosted the market for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks! Proofpoint, an email security firm, scrutinizes a chain email making rounds on the Internet. Entitled "Here you can buy DDOS", the email is brief & eloquent: “If you don’t like Obama, come here; you can help to DDOS his site with your installs”.

Those who click on the accompanying link end up on a site with malware. According to Proofpoint, the site "offers visitors money to install the software and – get this – advises users to return to the website for updated versions if their anti-virus software is detecting and disabling it against the user’s wishes". MXLogic has more details.

Does the hate of Obamacare outweigh the hate of viruses? How else to explain why rational people – in full knowledge of the fact that they are downloading malware that could cripple their computers – would do so anyway, if only to cause some problems to WhiteHouse.gov?

Expect the unexpected: an editorial in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal would probably blame cyberwarfare on Obamacare!

Evgeny Morozov is a fellow at the Open Society Institute and sits on the board of OSI's Information Program. He writes the Net Effect blog on ForeignPolicy.com

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