{"id":3172,"date":"2014-04-10T07:48:37","date_gmt":"2014-04-10T11:48:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/me-en.kaspersky.com\/blog\/?p=3172"},"modified":"2020-02-26T18:58:25","modified_gmt":"2020-02-26T14:58:25","slug":"heartbleed-vulnerability-may-compromise-your-security-on-thousands-of-sites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/me-en.kaspersky.com\/blog\/heartbleed-vulnerability-may-compromise-your-security-on-thousands-of-sites\/3172\/","title":{"rendered":"“Heartbleed” Vulnerability may compromise your security on thousands of sites"},"content":{"rendered":"

UPDATE<\/strong>: A previous version of this article stated \u2013 citing a list on Github \u2013 that users on a site called HideMyAss were affected by Heartbleed. A spokesperson from that site reached out to us claiming that their users are not affected, and we removed them from the list of affected sites accordingly.<\/em>
\nUPDATE #2<\/strong>: The post is updated with the list of affected services<\/a> which officially recommend to change users\u2019 passwords.<\/em><\/p>\n

You know a security vulnerability is a serious one when NPR\u2019s David Green leads into the 8 AM hour of Morning Edition talking about it. Such was the case yesterday morning, with the story of a serious encryption flaw \u2013 dubbed Heartbleed \u2013 in OpenSSL, perhaps the most widely deployed encryption library on the Internet. If you\u2019re a bit confused about what this all means, don\u2019t worry, I am going to attempt to unpack the whole story in the next 500 words or so.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"heart\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When you establish an encrypted connection<\/a> to a website, whether it\u2019s Google, Facebook, or your bank\u2019s online branch, the data is encrypted using the SSL\/TLS protocol. Many popular web servers utilize the open-source OpenSSL library to do this job for them. Earlier this week, the maintainers of OpenSSL released a fix for a serious bug<\/a> in the implementation of TLS feature called \u201cHeartbeat,\u201d which could potentially reveal up to 64 kB of server memory to an attacker.<\/p>\n

In other words, the flaw could have enabled anyone on the Internet to read the memory of a machine that\u2019s protected by a vulnerable version of the library. In the worst-case scenario, this small block of memory may contain something sensitive \u2013 user names, passwords, or even the private key which is used by the server to keep your connection encrypted. In addition, exploiting Heartbleed leaves no traces, so there is no definite way to tell if a server was hacked and what kind of data was stolen.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the good news: OpenSSL fixed the bug. Here\u2019s the bad news: there is no way to guarantee that those sites and services affected by Heartbleed are implementing the patch that mitigates it. More bad news: apparently the bug is pretty easy to exploit and may have existed for as long as two years. It means that the security certificates of many popular sites may have been stolen, as well as sensitive user data, including passwords.<\/p>\n

The action plan for the user<\/h2>\n

<\/a>Update:<\/b>Mashable collected the list<\/a> of official PR responses from affected web services. To save your time on table reading and certificate checking (more on this below), you can simply change your password<\/strong> on all these sites: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Yahoo, AWS, Box, Dropbox, Github, IFFT, Minecraft, OKCupid, SoundCloud, Wunderlist. Use a unique password<\/strong> for each site!<\/p>\n