Submitted by: Wendy Brooks, Marketing Director at Palmetto Technology Group, an Outsourced IT Support company headquartered in Greenville, SC.
If your brand has any online presence at all, then chances are you’ve heard of the major security flaw dubbed...Heartbleed. Or at least you should have heard about it. As data security breaches go, this one is being considered by many in our industry to be one of the worst security flaws the digital world has yet experienced. Two-thirds of the world’s servers are susceptible and the personal data of millions of users may be exposed.
The security vulnerability takes place in an encryption protocol known as OpenSSL, a technology that many businesses use to protect information such as usernames and passwords. For many consumers, Heartbleed means their credentials are at risk of being stolen. This allows attackers to eavesdrop on communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate these services and users.
Fortunately, this did not affect any Microsoft based sites. However, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other tech companies scrambled this week to patch their services. If you're a customer of one of these companies and you haven't changed your passwords, you will want to do so. First, you want to be certain that the sites you access have been patched. I have provided the link to check this below. Remember, using the same password for all sites puts you at a greater risk. We recommend using different passwords on websites that have access to your finances!
Check for site patch here: http://filippo.io/Heartbleed