The Heartbleed bug is the trending topic online this week and I hope to consolidate some resources and explain what the issue is. The end of this post contains many links that will also help explain the situation. What is it? It is a security vulnerability that has existed in the OpenSSL software library for two years. Heartbleed allows an attacker to read data that would otherwise be considered protected. This includes things like passwords, emails, and private keys. Unfortunately this act of reading data is undetectable, so we must assume that all passwords have been stolen and an attacker has copied all the private keys. For those unfamiliar with public-key cryptography, a private key is what identifies someone online, allowing them to read encrypted messages sent to them. This can also allows someone to pretend they are Facebook and perform other such attacks. OpenSSL is used by the most popular web server on the internet, Apache (approximately 66%...
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