BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – A new online bug dubbed ‘Heartbleed’ has popular social, email and websites scrambling to implement new security measures to protect their user’s accounts from being hacked.
Information reaching SKNVibes states that Heartbleed has already affected a great amount of the Internet.
According to American News agency ABC, it is affecting a huge chunk of the Internet, which means that a password change is likely in order for hundreds of millions of people.
More than half a million sites that use the security system called Open SSL are vulnerable, according Netcraft, and they have had to install a new security patch.
Before this patch, private data on websites such as Yahoo, Google and Tumblr could have been vulnerable to hackers, experts said. This bug was discovered by a team of security engineers at tech company Codenomicon and Neel Mehta of Google Security.
Meanwhile, Joost Bijl, a product manager with the cybersecurity firm Fox IT, said that affected websites should be letting consumers know that a fix has been installed. But, so far, it does not appear that any major website besides Tumblr has reached out to consumers.
According to Heartbleed.com, 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.
It stated too, that 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).
