The Heartbleed Bug is quite possibly the biggest security threat that the Internet has ever seen due to the fact that anyone who has logged on to any of the affected sites within the last two years is at risk, and could have had any of their private information – from passwords to credit card information – compromised by cybercriminals.o

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The scary part about the Heartbleed Bug is that it was completely out of the user’s hands; it didn’t matter if the user kept all of his software patched, used a strong antivirus suite, regularly changed passwords, and avoided shady websites – he or she may still be affected because the problem is in the open source set of libraries for encrypting online services, OpenSSL, which is used by many secure websites (ones that use “https” in the URL.) Big name sites like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Pinterest, Instagram, OKCupid and many more were affected by this bug so chances are if you’ve been actively using the Internet for the past couple of years, your private information was left vulnerable by the bug.

How Do I Keep My Website Safe from Heartbleed?

Since the Heartbleed Bug is not really a virus, there’s nothing you can do from an end user standpoint to keep your website safe. It’s the responsibility of companies and services that were affected by the bug to deal with Heartbleed, and reports point to the fact that they have already patched things on their end.

The good news is that cybercriminals probably failed to discover the heartbleed bug before it was discovered by Google’s security team and the software firm named Codenomicon, so if your accounts have not been hacked yet, chances are it’s safe for now. The bad news is the fact that the bug allowed attackers to infiltrate servers and copy private information without leaving any trace, so there is no way to know if your account was already compromised and the hackers are just biding their time before they use it.

The best course of action? Now that services have already patched things, it is time to change your passwords. It may be a lot of hard work but you need to be thorough. The fact that services these days are interconnected means that you can’t leave one password unchanged – email accounts for instance can be used to gain access to other online accounts, as password resets usually send the new passwords to the email used for registration.

Besides, it’s good practice to regularly change your passwords so you’ll only be doing what you should already be doing religiously in the first place.

Tags: data security

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2014 at 7:05 am and is filed under Data Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.