Business -- 16 days ago
The Heartbleed Bug: The Passwords You need to Change
Words: Violet
, We hear about potential bugs on the internet all the time and often it is hard to know how seriously we should to take it and how much it will effect us. This new encryption flaw, Heartbleed bug, is being named as potentially one of the biggest security threats the internet has ever seen. This week, security researchers announced there has been a security flaw in OpenSSL, a data encryption standard that enables in-the-know hackers to access and extract huge amounts of information and data from services we all use and assume are secure (this includes credit card numbers and passwords).
Worryingly, Heartbleed has affected many of the sites we all use everyday including Facebook, Tumblr and Gmail. Now, some internet companies have updated their servers to fix the issue so, for these sites, you need to go and change your password immediately. It is also important to remember that, although there is no assurance that your data was compromised, there has been no signs that the hackers even knew about the potential breach until the information was released this week. Now it is out in the open, however, it is even more important to change your passwords for potentially effected sites.
Security firm Codenomicon reports, “You are likely to be affected either directly or indirectly. OpenSSL is the most popular open source cryptographic library and TLS (transport layer security) implementation used to encrypt traffic on the Internet. Your popular social site, your company’s site, commercial site, hobby site, sites you install software from or even sites run by your government might be using vulnerable OpenSSL.”
So is it serious? Well, yes very. Though it is unclear which websites have been effected it is essential you go on and change all your passwords. The list of potentially effected sites includes Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Tumblr, Gmail, Dropbox, OKCupid and Soundcloud.
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