Just what IS that Heartbleed virus?
First of all, it’s not technically a virus, it’s a security flaw, but for all intents and purposes the virus label has stuck and is continuing to be used to describe this computer bug which takes advantage of a weakness that has always existed in most secure websites, allowing your supposedly safely guarded information to leak on the Internet. This has been happening since, 2012, in fact.
Per Wikipedia (yes, this can have its limitations, but in this case the synopsis is helpful):
Heartbleed is a security bug in the open-source OpenSSL cryptography library, widely used to implement the Internet’s Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. This vulnerability results from a missing bounds check in the handling of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) heartbeat extension,[3] the heartbeat being behind the bug’s name.[4] A fixed version of OpenSSL was released on April 7, 2014, at the same time as Heartbleed was publicly disclosed.
If you’re more visual, this comic from xkcd explains the virus in a silly but effective way, I think.
Rest assured, your SpaBoom service has not been compromised by the Heartbleed bug!
Many of you will have changed your passwords for Facebook and/or Twitter, though, which was a good thing to do! You will need to reset your integration within your SpaBoom account as a result of this. Please give us a call to help with that reset, and to answer any and all questions you may have about the security of your SpaBoom account!
We’re here to help!
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