Obamacare Tech Firm Tried, Failed to Build Gun Registry in Canada

CGI, the Canadian company whose U.S. subsidiary built the failed Obamacare website, was once contracted to build a federal gun registry for the Canadian government, Breitbart News has learned. 

CGI’s contract was canceled in 2007 after a report by the Auditor General found that the Canadian Firearms Information System (CFIS) being built by CGI was “significantly over budget” and that it had been plagued by delays.

The Conservative government that took power in 2006 canceled CGI’s gun registry contract, and eventually repealed the Canadian gun registry entirely. 

In another parallel to the Obamacare controversy in the United States, the gun registry had been passed in 1993 over vehement Conservative objections, and was upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2000, before finally being repealed in most of the country in 2012.

The failed gun registry was only one of CGI’s many Canadian failures, which included canceled contracts to build health care databases in the provinces of Ontario and New Brunswick. Despite CGI’s checkered record, the Obama administration awarded its U.S. subsidiary, CGI Federal, the $ 93.7 million contract to build healthcare.gov, part of $ 678 million in health care services contracts awarded to the company. 

Brian Lilley of Canada’s Sun News reported Monday on CGI’s history of failures, cost overruns, and conflicts of interest, including the gun registry: 

CGI was hired to make sure that the then-Liberal government’s gun control program was efficient and high-tech. It never worked the way it should have. Was it bad programming or bad government decisions? The truth is, we don’t know–we just got stuck with the bill.

New York Times site hack shifts attention to registry locks

Computerworld – One way that owners of major websites can mitigate the risk of their domains being hijacked like The New York Times’ site
was on Tuesday is to apply what is known as a registry lock on the domain, security researchers say.

A registry lock is basically a mechanism under which any requests for changes to a domain name server have to be manually
verified and authenticated by a top-level domain owner like Verisign and NeuStar, which operate the dotcom and dotbiz domains
respectively.

A registry lock provides an additional layer of protection against DNS tampering and is particularly useful in situations
where a domain name registrar might be compromised, the security researchers said.

On Tuesday, The Times blamed a prolonged website outage on a hacking attack at the company’s Australia-based domain name registrar, Melbourne IT.

The Times said hackers belonging to the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) gained access to the company’s DNS records by compromising
its domain name registrar. The attackers then used that access to change the paper’s DNS record so it was pointing to systems
in Syria and Moscow.

Melbourne IT, in turn, blamed the outage on one of its resellers, whose account was apparently compromised and used to change several domain names, including
that of The Times, Twitter and others.

H.D. Moore, chief research officer at security vendor Rapid7, said registry locks make it much more difficult to make such
DNS changes.

Typically, changes to name servers are handled directly by domain registrars such as Melbourne IT and not by the top-level
domain owners. A registry lock prevents the registrar from making any changes on its own and instead allows changes to be
made only with the approval of the top-level owner.

“Instead of updating a record through your registrar’s website, you have to contact the [Top Level Domain] owner instead and
go through a secondary form of authentication,” Moore said. “It makes sense for big brands, but does impose a maintenance
penalty on organizations who change DNS providers frequently.”p>

At the time of the attack, many of the major websites hosted by Melbourne IT did not have a registry lock in place, Moore
said. Among the companies using Melbourne IT are Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Ikea, AOL and dozens of other major site owners.

While there is no evidence that the attackers made changes to any of these domains, they were potentially vulnerable, Moore
said. “In other words, things could have been much worse.”

Since the attacks on The Times, several of the websites using Melbourne IT as a registrar have applied registry locks, Moore
said. Among the websites that appear to have put a lock in place are the Huffington Post, Mapquest, Starbucks and Twitter’s
TweetDeck. However, many other major websites using Melbourne IT have not done so yet, and remain vulnerable.

Matthew Prince, co-founder of CloudFlare, saiddomain registrars generally do not make it easy for website owners to request
registry locks, however. “[Locks] make processes like automatic renewals more difficult,” Prince said in a blog post. “However, if you have a domain that may be at risk, you should insist that your registrar put a registry lock in place.”

Netflash

New York Times site hack shifts attention to registry locks