The Daily Parker

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The heart bleeds for OpenSSL

Bruce Schneier, not one for hyperbole, calls the Heartbleed defect an 11 on a 10 scale:

Basically, an attacker can grab 64K of memory from a server. The attack leaves no trace, and can be done multiple times to grab a different random 64K of memory. This means that anything in memory -- SSL private keys, user keys, anything -- is vulnerable. And you have to assume that it is all compromised. All of it.

"Catastrophic" is the right word.

At this point, the odds are close to one that every target has had its private keys extracted by multiple intelligence agencies. The real question is whether or not someone deliberately inserted this bug into OpenSSL, and has had two years of unfettered access to everything. My guess is accident, but I have no proof.

It turns out, Windows systems don't use OpenSSL very much, favoring TLS 1.2 these days. So if you're visiting a Windows system (basically anything with ".aspx" at the end), you're fine.

Still, if you've used Yahoo! or any other system that has this bug, change your password. Now.

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