What is Heartbleed bug?
A heartbleed bug is one of the biggest and serious threats on the Internet. It’s a vulnerability in popular OpenSSL cryptographic library. OpenSSL is a widely used execution of suite of security protocols known as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) that helps in encrypting the traffic when surfing the Web.
Each time when you send and receive data online or do online an transaction, there will be chance of sending your data through an SSL. You can check if your sending your data through SSL by a “https” with a green indicator or a lock icon in address bar. Some VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) and email, chat programs will also use the systems that are tied to OpenSSL for transmitting communications and data in a secured way.
Heartbleed bug is terrifying and unique because it allows anyone to access a computer system memory and read all data (including confidential data), which is protected by vulnerable version of OpenSSL software.
What effect it causes?
As per, Sam Kottler, a software engineer has worked on numerous open source security and systems management projects (and once worked at Digg), “Anything that you wouldn’t want an ‘Internet bad guy’ to see is Cityfied vulnerable on sites using unpatched versions of OpenSSL.”
Things like banking information, credit card data, passwords and titillating personal photos are possibly vulnerable. Essentially, everything that you do on the Internet.
Is my data compromised?
It is purely on site-by-site basis and we can’t say whether your data are compromised or not. Responsible organizations or sites will inform you if they believe that any of your data has been compromised.
From your end, be very careful while opening emails and look out for phishing scams. Keep close attention to notifications from credit card companies, internet services and banks and follow security requests if they make any.
Do, I need to change passwords? If it is so, when?
As far as 4GoodHosting servers are concerned, we have fixed the problem. As the software is widespread, it will take some time for fixing the roll out across web.
If you have any queries, you can always easily open a support ticket at support@4GoodHosting.com
If you have any questions, you can always easily open a support ticket at support@4GoodHosting.com
