Heartbleed follow-up

Overview of events

On Monday April 7th, a serious vulnerability was identified in one of the most popular implementations of the SSL protocol, called OpenSSL.  SSL is a very important security protocol used throughout the Internet. Not only does SSL encrypt your online communications, but it helps ensure you are connecting to legitimate websites when you do things like shop or bank online

What it does

The Heartbleed vulnerability allows a hacker to connect to a webserver and harvest sensitive information, which may include your login and password. If an attacker were able to harvest such information, they could use that information to log into any of your accounts using the same username and password. Most sites including Facebook, Yahoo, CNN were affected.

Steps you should take

There are several steps you can take to protect yourself. Not only will these steps help protect you against the Heartbleed vulnerability, but they will help protect you against many other attacks in the future

·         First, change your passwords on websites that you know were vulnerable and have patched the vulnerability, starting with your most important accounts first. If you do not know if a website was vulnerable, go ahead and change your password anyway. This is a great time to update your passwords and improve your online security.

·         Make sure you update your passwords you use strong, hard-to-guess passwords. In addition, if the website supports something called two-step verification, enable it. This is an additional step that helps make your online account more secure. Finally, if your password has personal questions, we recommend changing the answers.

·         Make sure you are using a separate, unique password for each of your online accounts. That way, even if one website is compromised, all of your other accounts will still be safe. Can’t remember all of your passwords? Congratulations, that means you are using strong passwords. We highly recommend you use this opportunity to start using a password manager that stores all of your passwords securely. These are great tools that can not only simplify your online activities, but help make them far more secure.

·         Do not forget your email clients. If your email client, such as Outlook or Apple Mail, is using SSL to connect to your mail server, you may need to change those passwords as well.

Have a safe day