Heart
The widely-discussed Heartbleed security bug has caused serious distress across the Web, forcing big sites from Yahoo all the way to the US HealthCare.gov website to take some serious measures. You can skip all the technicalities regarding Heartbleed and quickly realize that you should change the password of all services you are registered in that uses the open-source OpenSSL cryptography library. But what you really should do is change the passwords of all accounts that contain sensitive information. Your primary email account should be the first in line as it often serves as the hub for all the accounts you have in other websites. Then you should find out what accounts have very personal information like credit card details and take action too.
Of course, a lot of people will ignore that advice because let’s face it, the odds of your personal or business accounts being compromised are quite low given all the potential areas of attack that hackers can take advantage of. But the threat of Heartbleed is indeed real as there was a recent report of an individual being arrested in an attempt to steal taxpayer data.
We can either wait for more Heartbleed news to surface or we can protect our accounts by changing our passwords as soon as possible. It can be difficult to let go of a password that you can always remember and it can be difficult to get into the practice of using different passwords for different accounts even if this technique can vastly reduce the chances of falling victim to account theft. But that is where tools like LastPass can come in handy.
One last thing that you should remember about Heartbleed is that the big companies affected by the bug are gradually working to patch their sites. Once you can confirm that these sites have been patched, you should consider changing your passwords yet again just to make sure your data is safe. There are some online services including LastPass’s own service that helps you check if a site is vulnerable to Heartbleed. If you use Chrome, you should install the Chromebleed extension too as it scans any website you visit for known Heartbleed vulnerabilities.