APRIL 2014
H
business elite canada
9
HEARTBLEED BUG CAUSES
USERS TO THINK BEFORE
THEY POST
L
ike checking your body for lumps every 4-6 months, checking your computer
for viruses must also be implemented. Even in today’s intuitive, post-Siri world,
technology blunders are inevitable. The recent Heartbleed bug virus took the
digital world by storm, becoming a hackers dream come true and every users fear. The
bug is a flaw discovered in OpenSSL - the most popular open-source cryptographic
library used by the majority of websites that contain the data users want to keep se-
cure. It’s the lifeline user’s trust when sending confidential emails, chatting on IM, or
browsing their Facebook. The ‘heartbeat’ is the small packet of data that asks for a
response from one computer at the end of a secure connection, though the problem
arises when well-disguised packets of data takes its place to trick the computer at the
other end into sending data stored in its memory. This incognito virus has been on the
grid for about two years, say Google security researchers, and can pull up any stored
information, including credit-card numbers and passwords.
To battle the virus head-on, these websites will need to update their software and use
an online tool called the Heartbleed test to examine if the website has been compro-
mised by the virus. Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and Yahoo! have already updated their
software, though users should still change all passwords for these websites and be
wary of what they post online.
Now on the government’s radar, the Heartbleed bug has prompted all federal depart-
ments using software that is vulnerable to the virus to immediately disable public
websites.
