http://www.yourtechtamer.com/blog/2014/04/yes-you-really-must-pay-attention-to-the-heartbleed-bug/
(Sorry, I don’t usually send out posts so close together, but this one is important)
By now, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you MUST have heard about the “Heartbleed” Security flaw. And, yes, *sigh*, it DOES involve your passwords and online security.
Some of your most prevalent websites were affected, potentially exposing your personal information to nefarious plotters.
THIS APPLIES TO ALL YOU MAC USERS, as well!! It’s not a computer hardware security hole, but rather, a website logon security hole.
So…how do you know if you’ve been affected? Trust me, 99% of you who have online signons were affected. I found two TERRIFIC articles (thanks Mashable and GitHub) on whether or not the most popular websites are vulnerable.
For a list of those sites which you most likely use – and whether or not you need to change your password for that site – please click here:
http://mashable.com/2014/04/09/heartbleed-bug-websites-affected/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link
Change any passwords where they recommend you change them.
NOTE: If a site has NOT been patched for the security flaw, then changing you password will do NO GOOD. Wait and change that password once the site has been patched. Check the list every day or two for the next couple of weeks.
Want to check out a site yourself (maybe a smaller site that isn’t on one of these lists)? Click here and enter the URL you need/want to check. (Thanks for Jane McLaughlin, Lifecycle Software, for this site)
For a LARGER list – the 10,000 most popular sites which could be exposed because of password vulnerability – check out this list:
https://github.com/musalbas/heartbleed-masstest/blob/master/top10000.txt
Tip: To see if a particular website you frequent is on the list, open up the list, then hit CTRL+F (Windows users) and enter a part of the site name…you’ll be ‘searching’ for just sites containing whatever you typed in. Makes it a WHOLE LOT faster than scanning 10,000 lines.
If password management just makes your head spin, you might refresh yourself with some password management tools in an earlier post that we did:
http://www.yourtechtamer.com/blog/2011/09/password-management-grrrrr-but-ya-gotta-do-it/
