On the 8th April a group of security researchers published information about a newly discovered exploit in a popular encryption library. With some marketing panache, they called this exploit “Heartbleed”.

A huge number of Internet services were vulnerable to this exploit, and although many of them have now been patched many remain. In particular, this was an Open Source library and so many of the very largest and most popular sites were directly affected.

Attention on the exploit has so far focused on the possible use of the exploit to obtain “key material” from affected sites, but there are some more immediate ramifications and you need to act to protect yourself.

Unfortunately the attack will also reveal other random bits of webserver’s memory, which can include usernames, passwords and cookies. Obtaining this information will allow attackers to log into these services as you, and then conduct more usual fraud and identity theft.

Once the dust has settled (so later today on the 9th, or tomorrow on the 10th) you should go and change every single one of your passwords. Start with the passwords you’ve used recently and high value services.

It’s probably a good idea to clear all your cookies too once you’ve done this, to force you to re-login to every service with your new password.

You should also log out of every single service on your phone, and then re-login in, to get new session cookies. If you are particularly paranoid, wipe your phone and reinstall. Mobile app session cookies are likely to be a very popular vector for this attack.

This is an enormous amount of work, but you can use it as an opportunity to set some decent random passwords for every service and adopt a tool like LastPass, 1Password or KeePass while you are at it.

Most people are hugely vulnerable to password disclosure because they share passwords between accounts, and the entire world of black-hats are out there right now slurping passwords off every webserver they can get them from. There is going to be a huge spike in fraud and identity theft soon, and you want to make sure you are not a victim to it.

The Man-In-The-Middle Attack

In simple terms this would allow an attacker to impersonate the site’s SSL certificate, so they can show the padlock icon that demonstrates a secure connection, even though they control your connection.

They can only do this if they also manage to somehow make your browser connect to their computers for the request. This can normally only be done by either controlling part of your connection directly (hacking your router maybe), or by “poisoning” your access to the Domain Name Service with which you find out how to reach a site (there are many ways to do this, but none of them are trivial).

You can expect Internet security types to be fretting about this one for a long time to come, and there are likely to be some horrific exploits against some high-profile sites executed by some of the world’s most skilled hackers. If they do it well enough, we may never hear of it.

The impact of this exploit is going to have huge ramifications for server operators and system designers, but there is very little in practical terms that most people can mitigate this risk for their own browsing.

About us: Isotoma is a bespoke software development company based in York and London specialising in web apps, mobile apps and product design. If you’d like to know more you can review our work or get in touch.