All You Need To Know About Heartbleed

Increasingly becoming one of the most unavoidable vulnerabilities in the history of the modern web, the Heartbleed OpenSSL is a serious issue. A fully technical problem, being vulnerable to the Heartbleed OpenSSL would mean that your site is in very, very big trouble.

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Why Heartbleed Is A Big Deal

As the name suggests, this vulnerability makes your heart bleed – out of despair, if you understand it – and out of insatiable curiosity when you don’t. Perhaps the worst part of the bug is that because it is a technical hitch, you have very limited method of protecting yourself from it.

Encryption Is Where It All Lies

In layman terms, Heartbleed arises from problems in encryption of the data you send from one web server to another. While you may be super convinced that your private data is secure, it is not always the case. When OpenSSL has a flaw, the secret keys between you and the server are accessible by a third-party user.

Heartbleed Is Scary

What happens when your secret keys are accessible by someone else is that they get to spy on every single thing you do on the web and access all the information you put. What’s worse, they can go completely undetected. In fact, Heartbleed is a vulnerability that has been designed to do just that – remain unseen.

Should You Change All Your Passwords?

OpenSSL’s vulnerable version has been around since 2011, and that means your apps, websites, bank information and private messages have all been vulnerable since then. The first thing that comes to everyone’s mind as a solution at this point is to change all your passwords. And maybe that’s exactly what you should do – but only after you make sure that all the services you use have patched servers.