Heard about Heartbleed yet? I bet you have. Here is what you need to know if you haven’t heard of it yet and how to secure yourself against it.

What is Heartbleed?

Heartbleed has been making big news this week and for good reason. Most websites requiring or offering that you login have been affected by it.

Heartbleed is a vulnerability that was introduced into an open source security protocol (SSL) commonly used across the internet back in December 2011. This vulnerability has remained a part of the SSL source code since then and was only publicly announced this week. This potentially means that those familiar with the vulnerability were able to access normally very secure information if they knew how.

If you would like to find out more about Heartbleed then we have listed some great resources below:

Heartbleed.org has a great summary about Heartbleed including more in depth details about how it works.
Chromebleed is a Google Chrome extension that shows you if a website has been affected by Heartbleed
Lastpass offers a tool for seeing if a site has been affected.

In simple terms this is the situation

If you have a login account for an affected website then you should change your password BUT ONLY AFTER THAT WEBSITE HAS CONFIRMED THAT THEY HAVE FIXED HEARTBLEED ON THEIR SIDE.
Most websites have been proactive with this and have informed their users when they have fixed the issue.

How to create a secure password

It is highly recommended that you use different passwords for all of your different online accounts. This is so if one of your passwords is compromised then the hacker is not able to gain access to all of your accounts. But creating one secure password is hard enough, how do you create one for every website you access? We put together the below video to give you some helpful tips:

We also offer two great FREE tools for helping you with your passwords:

Password Checker can be used to determine how secure your current passwords are.
Password Generator can generate new and secure passwords for you. Saving you a lot of time trying to create them yourself.

If you have any comments or questions please feel free to leave a comment below or ask us a question in ReviverSoft Answers.