We’re back with the rest of John McAfee’s take on cybersecurity in 2014 – a little bit about the Healthcare.gov website, spying and his forthcoming product D-Central.

SiliconANGLE: I saw somewhere that you called the Healthcare.gov website “a hacker’s wet dream”.  We’ve covered a bunch of these issues here from the beginning.   They’re certainly working on this things furiously to try and patch it up, make it right.  Do you see this as an ongoing issue in the year ahead?

McAfee:  There’s no way they’re going to be able to fix that.  The whole thing is broken.  The testing was skipped, there were certificate issues and all this data is a really big problem.

SA: How would you fix it – does it need a reboot?

McAfee: If I was in the driver’s seat, absolutely – we’re talking about a complete reboot and it wouldn’t and shouldn’t have cost what they paid for this thing in the first place.  A good technology manager could have done it for a few million dollars.  It’s a website, it’s data and it’s putting it all together.   What in the world did they do?  It’s the kind of thing that’s being done all the time in the private industry, but because it’s the government they can’t even do this without missing some of the basics.

Here’s just one security example, aside from the state exchanges – There’s only one name in use – ‘healthcare.gov’ – That’s wide open for fraud right there.  They should have picked up a bunch more domains that sounded similar to help cut down on the fraud.  With maybe 100K out of that big expenditure they could have gotten two maybe three thousand of these domain names.  Instead they cause this confusion through missing this pretty amateur thing.  And now we’re seeing these false domains pop up and steal information.  That’s just government idiocy.  There is no way for the average person to validate and verify an exchange site, meaning they have no way to know that the site they’re on is the real one.  We’re going to see man-in-the-middle attack stories come out.  We’ll see more fraud just based on this one piece that was missed alone and it will get worse as more and more people will have to sign up in this next year.

SA: Privacy and digital freedom are two of the biggest issues in the news still.  Do you see this continuing to get the attention that it has?

McAfee: It’s an ongoing issue for sure and it will only get bigger.  It’s not just the NSA, it’s all over the place really.  Consider that FISMA (the Federal Information Security Management Act), it is designed on the surface to protect the public’s data.  But if you actually read it you’ll find it has nothing to do with protecting data.  The design allows for the interception of terrorist communications and it also allows for the reading of all information at will.  Now the language and name of this thing can be cleaned up but law is still there, and we see the subject gets changed all the time.

The public is fed up and closer to the problem than ever before.  By the end of next year we will all be fed up.  China will tip the wheel – believe me – by the time D-Central comes out the world will be ready.

SA:  What can you tell us about D-Central?

McAfee: We’re developing this with this mission in mind.  The fact is that some terrible things are coming and if you look at all this time, effort and money that has been wasted in surveillance of citizens, it you look at the way you have to through the airport with the TSA, getting half undressed then redressed, all those man hours, it adds up to years.  People are fed up and all this surveillance will put them over the top especially as more of these stories come out.  That’s who we are here for – the consumer.  It’s because right now the military, these intelligence outfits and all these covert agencies are armed with all this technology while the rest of us have very little to counter that.  Our privacy and security is disappearing at a rapid pace.  We created this government to provide certain things but not watch over us.  That’s somehow what it’s become.

D-Central is a network that is fluid and non-fixed.  It’s built so that it is very difficult to get into, difficult to track and monitor.  Your network will change constantly due to the way the architecture it’s built on is structured and that is going to make this de-centralized.  That’s D-Central – expect it in 2014.

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