Heartbleed: How to protect your personal information.

It's all over the news and for good reason. The Heartbleed security vulnerability identified recently was reported to affect an estimated 66% of the entire Internet at the time of it's discovery. That's mind-boggling! The exploit affected OpenSSL, an encryption tool that is used to protect data transmission across the internet. The result is that your personal information, data and passwords may have been exposed. So today we outline some steps you can take to protect yourself.

Check this list of major websites affected

GitHub's list of the 1000 largest websites and who has been affected so you have a starting point for updating your passwords.

Change Your Passwords

If you have accounts on any of the sites affected, update your password.  If you use that password on other sites, it's time to update them too preferably with a different password for each website. If you need help with that, then check out a previous post on how to manage multiple passwords

Use browser plugins to detect vulnerable sites

If you are using Chome, the Chromebleed plugin and for Firefox users the Heartbleed Add-on will alert you if a website you are using and therefore your personal information is vulnerable.