The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) failed to implement basic protections against hackers when it developed a system to track covid-19 data in 2020, according to an internal watchdog report it never made publicly available.
The inspector general report concluded that those failures before deployment of the HHS Protect program left it “susceptible to an unknown and possibly unacceptably high risk of failure or compromise from unintentional disruptions (e.g., man-made or natural disasters) or cyberattacks.” A successful attack could’ve hampered pandemic response, the report concluded. …
The report also found similar failings in another, related HHS program called TeleTracking. But on Aug. 24 — the same day the inspector general (IG) delivered the report to The Washington Post — the IG rescinded the whole report. It cited unspecified inaccuracies in the part of the report that scrutinized TeleTracking.
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