Is Heartbleed dangerous? Should you be worried?
Answer to both those questions is yes. You should be worried about this bug as it might expose your personal details, personal data and even credit card numbers to hackers. This bug has been identified as one of the biggest security holes the Internet has ever encountered. Millions of websites were affected by this security flaw, but most of them have already recovered.
Is it time to reset passwords?
Well, not exactly. While a lot of major web service providers including Google, Yahoo, Facebook have fixed the bug in their system to protect their users, thousands of other website are still in safe mode to find a fix. So, if you panic and start resetting your passwords on all your websites immediately, it’ll be ineffective because changing your password before the bug is fixed could compromise your new password as well. Mashable has a list of websites that are safe for you to change passwords, you should start from there. Also you can use this tool called Heartbleed Test developed by Filippo Valsorda to see if any of your registered websites are affected by this bug and if they have already fixed it.
Use tough passwords
A lot of internet giants like Google says that users don’t have to change passwords on their services as the company has fixed the bug. But, it’s probably a good idea to change it anyway, just to be on the safe side. And, when choosing a password, try not to change it to 12345 or your birthday. Make a tough password by combining upper and lowercase letters with numbers and symbols. Also try to get different passwords for each of your services. You can use a tool like Norton’s Password Generator to get a good password.
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