They hacking of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s online registry of DOT-certified medical examiners continues to cause concerns and inconvenience for examiners and drivers.
A story by News Editor James Jaillet in our sister site Overdrive this week says:
Drivers’ private medical information likely was not at risk in a recent hack of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s online registry of DOT-certified medical examiners. But if any information regarding examiners was stolen, specifically their license number, there could be potential for bogus medical certificates to be issued, according to interviews with several DOT-certified medical examiners.
The agency earlier this month said “there was no evidence of exposure of the personal information of drivers, medical examiners or motor carrier operators,” but the agency refuses to answer questions from Overdrive seeking to confirm whether FMCSA still sees no evidence of stolen data. Agency spokesperson Sharon Worthy, to whom Overdrive has sent repeated queries in recent weeks, also has refused to answer questions about how drivers can find medical examiners while the site is down and whether the outage has caused disruptions in the issuance of medical certificates. Worthy has also refused to answer questions about the nature of the hack and what data might have been at risk of exposure.
While there should be no issues for drivers during roadside inspections, the hack is worrying some medical examiners who fear their information could be used to create phony medical cards. Some examiners are also seeing a building backlog of completed exams that cannot be uploaded to the FMCSA system.
