What is this thing called Heartbleed?
Hi everyone,
There is talk going on about the security vulnerability called "Heartbleed" which affects servers which run SSL (secure connections) such as the members area here at Wealthy Affiliate.
I wanted to quickly chime in to let you know that you're safe here at WA.
A secure connection means that all information that you pass from your browser, to the server is encrypted. Heartbleed affected an SSL protocol called OpenSSL which upwards of 66% of the web uses.
To summarize, there was a bug exposed in the OpenSSL protocol which allowed the Heartbleed bug to intercept encrypted data.
There's nothing at WA for heartbleed to expose.
We do not store any sensitive information here at WA such as Credit Card info, or bank info, so there's nothing to expose. We do not store this information for this exact reason, to keep your sensitive data safe.
To verify for yourself that we are not affected by heartbleed here at WA, you can verify by doing a check on our domain "my.wealthyaffiliate.com"
So, you're totally safe here at WA!
Heartbleed affects servers and companies running secure services. For everyone here at WA, this does not affect your websites at all because you do not have SSL certificates, nor do you ever need to.
Cheers,
Carson
PS: For anyone interested you can read more about heartbleed here, it's INCREDIBLY technical, and unless you're someone running a server that uses openSSL, you do not need to concern yourself. Your financial institutions etc will most certainly be patching their services if they were vulnerable in the first place.
Recent Comments
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Good update, Carson....interesting that this bug has quietly been wreaking havoc for a couple of years, huh? Thanks for the clarification - we all needed to hear this from the top.
How's that cutie boy doing? And mom? All of you doing great I hope.
Suz
Thanks for letting us know. Seems like there's always someone somewhere hacking into whatever they can these days!
Thanks, Carson, for this excellent but practical exposition of the Heartbleed thing. Now we can all go back to work and not have this concerns!
Thanks Carson I had already checked out all of my sites and they are all OK! I wish the media would not get people all het up about something that is probably as minor as the year 2000 scare.
Thanks for sharing. There was all this hum on the news this morning about changing your passwords. Not sure it affects passwords. Debbie
I heard something about changing all your passwords too. I try and change mine out often, but don't always.
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Thank you, I was so clueless as or what this was about.
I followed Wayne's advice, and turned on something for certificates, don't even remember what that was anymore.... Was that necessary, good, bad or pointless?
Thank you!