ComputerWorld reports about the GAO (Government Accountability Office)report the the WAN that carries data for the Medicare network has security vulnerabilities. Who would have thought? There is both good and bad news in this, besides the obvious bad news that there were vulnerabilities.
The bad news is that this was a managed implementation by AT&T. They were paid $76.6 million dollars over 4 years to operate the WAN. I know that there will be problems and issues in any WAN implementation that large, but when you have been operating the WAN for the last 3 years and there are 47 vulnerabilities that have not been fixed something is wrong.
The good news is that CMS (Center for Medicare and Medicade Services) acted on the news as soon as they were informed by the GAO. It's good to see someone take responsibility for problems and work on getting them fixed right away instead of pointing fingers at AT&T or anyone else. I applaude them for taking action to fix problems.
