The Heartbleed Bug

662 Words2 Pages

The heartbleed bug the worst bug the Internet has ever seen. For more than two years now the heartbleed bug has exposed anyone with a Yahoo, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Pinterest account. Even Obama’s health care website healthcare.gov has urged its enrollees to change their passwords due to the heartbleed. The heartbleed bug is a hole in the software that is designed to turn your personal information into random strings of numbers and letters.This allows hackers to take advantage of the computer use to see if you are still online, they call this the heartbeat extension. This heartbeat signal can force your computer to give secret information that is stored in your computers memory. The websites that use this software usual have a padlock image in the address bar.
The heartbleed exposes your usernames and passwords. It can compromise the session keys that keep you logged into a website, which can allow a hacker to pose as you without needing to know what your password is. It allows the attackers to dupe a real website and a tricking you into giving the hacker your personal information. This heartbleed bug also leaves no trace so you may never know if you were hacked or not.
The researchers that discovered the issue have said that the problem has been present for more than two years, since March 2012. Any communication over the two years, a hacker could have been eavesdropping. This bug is not a simple fix because for there to be no security issues both the website that has been compromised and the individual users have to work together. The website has to upgrade to the patched version of the OpenSSL, revoke compromised SSL certificates and get new ones issued. After that then the individual users can go in and ...

... middle of paper ...

...l information.
I think that we should use more steps or use the biometric technology to help secure accounts, even though it takes longer and is harder to access your own account. It would also make that much harder for a hacker to access your account. There are still flaws in the fingerprint scanner because just as the new galaxy s5 came out they found a way to get past the fingerprint scanner. So I don’t think they should put biometric technology in just yet because it is not completely secure just yet. People should use the 2-step verification for the time being because it does provide another step the hackers have to go through before they can access an account. They should also use different passwords for every account, it is harder to remember all of the passwords but if you are worried about your internet security than you should use different passwords.

More about The Heartbleed Bug

Open Document