Change passwords to mitigate potential damage caused by the Heartbleed vulnerability: here are the sites where you should act.
In the past few hours, the news of the discovery of “Heartbleed”, a vulnerability in the OpenSSL security system, has spread.
This is a significant situation given that OpenSSL is a widely used protocol by the world’s largest platforms for transmitting particularly sensitive data.
From credit cards to personal data, thousands of absolutely important and therefore encrypted pieces of information pass through OpenSSL, which, if in the wrong hands, could cause immense damage to unsuspecting internet users.
The bug was detected and publicly disclosed a couple of days ago, so for many, it’s time to take precautions before potential problems arise.
What should we do as simple users of various services?
The most common advice is to change the passwords for the services you are using that naturally make use of OpenSSL.
Among the websites for which a password change is recommended are Amazon, Yahoo!, Tumblr, Oculus, Flickr, and Facebook.
However, it should be noted that the Facebook team has officially announced that the patch to “plug” the vulnerability has already been launched and currently no breaches or dangerous situations have been reported.
Google services might also be involved, and Dropbox is definitely being discussed; however, nothing is known about Apple and Twitter accounts.
The situation is critical-free for LinkedIn.
In any case, it’s always advisable to avoid using the same password for multiple services, or at least not to do so for high-risk services in case of data theft, such as online banking services or sites where you have decided to enter your credit card details.
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