Three months after a hack prompted an outage of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s online registry of DOT-certified medical examiners, the site remains down, and FMCSA has not offered a timeline for when the site will come back online, despite repeated inquiries by CCJ.
Agency spokesperson Sharon Worthy says that the DOT did set up a tool on the National Registry of Certified Medical Examiners site to allow drivers to search for certified examiners by zip code, but the full registry remains offline.
Though the hack hasn’t caused issues with roadside inspectors checking drivers’ medical certificates, it has created headaches for examiners, who have been forced to backlog exam results until the site is back online and enables them to upload the results to FMCSA. Also, examiners interviewed by CCJ last month fear the potential of fraudulent medical certificates to be created, should any information about examiners have been stolen in the hack.
FMCSA said in early January that it didn’t appear that any information on drivers, examiners or carriers had been stolen. “There was no evidence of exposure” of such information, FMCSA said in a statement on January 9.
The agency has has since repeatedly refused to answer questions from CCJ about whether this is still the case. CCJ has contacted Worthy on more than 10 occasions asking for information about the nature of the hack, the timeline for when the registry will come back online and whether it still believes drivers’ and examiners’ information was not exposed, among other questions.
The agency has not provided answers to these questions.
Collin Mooney, executive director of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, said in late January that the outage should not cause issues during roadside inspections. “The drivers are still required to take the medical [certificate] to the state and the state updates the CDL. Medicals are still able to be verified at roadside through CDLIS, not the national registry.”
