Heartbleed Bug Roils Technies

The Boston Globe reports on the Heartbleed bug that has IT departments scrambling across the nation.

The word “Heartbleed” meant nothing at the start of the week. Today it is one of the hottest topics on the Internet — a simple security bug in an obscure piece of software that could compromise the personal information of millions. And while the Internet’s biggest companies scramble to fix the problem, users had better get ready to upgrade their own security practices. “It’s not an academic exercise,” said Trey Ford, global security strategist at network security firm Rapid7 LLC in Boston. “I think this is a really big deal.” So big that Ford thinks people should take a time out from online retailers, financial services sites, or online destinations that require entering sensitive information — names, addresses, credit card numbers. “I probably wouldn’t log into those for a couple of days or so,” he said.

In a quote that immediate landed on thousands of blogs, one web security expert said of the seriousness of the Heartbleed threat, "On a scale of 1-10, this is an 11."  The bug was discovered by the Finnish company Codenomicon and they have created a website to explain the situation.