A quick notice to our Website Hosting clients: sites hosted with Black Cap Design are NOT affected by the Heartbleed Bug.
On Monday April 7, 2014 a major security vulnerability was disclosed on the Internet that can potentially affect some half a million servers worldwide. This vulnerability, known as the Heartbleed Bug affects the encryption keys that are at the core of SSL encryption. (Unencrypted internet connections begin with http, whereas encrypted connections begin with https.)
The Heartbleed Bug enables a hacker to access a hosting server’s private SSL encryption keys (like the combination to a lock) and then read the memory of the server, which can contain sensitive information.
This bug is serious enough that the Canada Revenue Agency took immediate action by taking parts of their website offline this week to implement a fix – during their busiest time of year.
It’s worthwhile checking with organizations you deal with who use SSL (financial institutions, social media accounts, webmail accounts) as part of their secure login process to see if they have been affected by this bug, and if so, what they are doing to deal with it. It’s also a good idea to take a few minutes and update passwords that may be vulnerable to this bug.
Here is a handy list of sites affected the by the Heartbleed Bug – and which passwords you should change right away:
http://mashable.com/2014/04/09/heartbleed-bug-websites-affected/
If your site is NOT hosted with Black Cap Design, we recommend asking your website hosting provider if your hosting server is vulnerable to the Heartbleed Bug and if steps are being taken to address the problem.
Contact us at 705-927-2308 or for more information about secure website hosting options and website security.