What actually is HEARTBLEED?
One of the biggest stories making rounds from the past few days is the discovery of the Heartbeed bug. This bug was discovered by a Finnish security firm called Codenomicon and an independent Google researcher, who came to know that one of the most widely used online security protocols was not as safe as it was thought to be. As a result, it is possible that millions of bank transactions, credit card numbers, passwords and other supposedly secure information could have been accessed by hackers. This flaw in online security has been undetected since more than 2 years, and it is unknown whether hackers have found out about it. Here’s more about the Heartbleed bug, who’s affected and what you can do about it. From a consumer point of view, any website that uses the vulnerable versions of OpenSSL are open to attack, and these websites can only protect themselves and their users by upgrading to the latest version that squashes the bug. However, in the two years that the ...