There has been so much fuss about the heartbleed bug in recent weeks. The NSA (National Security Agency) has also been said to have known about this bug over the years. Heartbleed has been said to be one of the biggest security threats the Internet has ever seen. The question is what is Heartbleed? Before going into the full details of Heartbleed, these are a list of passwords of some social media sites you might want to decide to change right now.
- Tumblr
- Yahoo
- Flickr
- Youtube
- Dropbox
- Wikipedia
- Box
- okcupid
Some Internet companies that were vulnerable to the bug have already updated their servers with a security patch to fix the issue. This means you’ll need to go in and change your passwords immediately for these sites.
Congrats to the loyal Apple fans as they are secluded from this list. Hotmail/outlook, Amazon, most banks, Evernote, Walmart, ebay are some of those excluded from the list.
The Heartbleed Bug is a serious vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library. This weakness allows stealing the information protected, under normal conditions, by the SSL/TLS encryption used to secure the Internet. SSL/TLS provides communication security and privacy over the Internet for applications such as web, email, instant messaging (IM) and some virtual private networks (VPNs). The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. This compromises the secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of the users and the actual content. This allows attackers to eavesdrop on communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users.
This bug was independently discovered by a team of security engineers (Riku, Antti and Matti) at Codenomicon and Neel Mehta of Google Security, who first reported it to the OpenSSL team. Codenomicon team found heartbleed bug while improving the SafeGuard feature in Codenomicon’s Defensics security testing tools and reported this bug to the NCSC-FI for vulnerability coordination and reporting to OpenSSL team.
Change your passwords now!
