What if we told you that your personal Facebook or Twitter account has been subjected to numerous hacks and compromises in the past couple of years without you even getting a slightest indication of what's happening behind your back. Sounds surreal, doesn't it? Welcome to the world of Heartbleed Open SSL.
We noted down a few things about the Heartbleed bug when we recently talked about how the bug is a massive problem for a number of popular sites and what's it all about.
Still is worth enough to reminding all you folks again that Heartbleed has the potential to be one of the biggest and most widespread vulnerabilities in the history of the modern day web.
The bug has already affected a number of popular websites and related services - and few of them are the ones you end up using almost everyday, like Gmail and Facebook. Now there are chances that it may have already given out your personal and sensitive account information in the past couple of years.
What makes it even more dangerous is the fact that these confidential information include credit card numbers and other bank-related passwords.
But wait! Are you already giving up your hope with a slight defeat in mind and moving toward deleting your personal page on Facebook or Twitter? Let's us tell you that there's no real need to panic since what has been done, has been there for the last two years.
And the only thing that you can do at the moment is follow a specified set of ways by which you can stay as secured as possible from the hackers. But what exactly can you do to reach that expected safe-zone? Here are the top 5 ways by which you can (somewhat) stay protected from the bug.
Keeping Check on Affected Sites
Before you head over to a certain site, make sure you check if it's already affected or not. One way by which you can attain that is by following Mashable's recently released list of sites that are open to vulnerabilities. Head over here to read through them.
Start Changing Passwords
This one is gravely important. Do yourself a favor and move over to your personal Twitter or Facebook page and change the passwords for the same. And this is because it's more than likely that the popular social networking sites will be on top of that Mashable list.
Read up Everything About it
No one expects you to be the "Man who knew too much," but it's still a strong point if you at least make a point and read about the bug as much as possible.
For example, read up on how much time it will take exactly to get rid of the bug. For starters, however, we will fill you up on that for the time being. to be perfectly honest, the bug will take a bit of time before it's completely eradicated, although several site administrators are already trying to get rid of it as soon as possible.
Wait for the Sites to get Fixed
If you can live without your daily fix of Facebook activities and other such net-based things, you better do that. It's better to be safe and keep away from the affected websites than be sorry about them later.
Test Your Server
If you're about to log into a particular site, you will do better if you check out this link first: Test your server for Heartbleed (CVE-2014-0160). Once there, enter the site's address in the search box. It'll tell you if the site in question is still vulnerable or not.
