Heartbleed Bleeds On

Jul 29, 2014

According to a report, many potential victims of the Heartbleed attack have patched their systems, but few have cleaned up the crime scene to protect themselves from the effects of a previous intrusion.

The recent Heartbleed scare revealed that millions of servers around the world were vulnerable to an SSL-based attack that could compromise private keys and thus allow an intruder to break into supposedly encrypted and secure Internet services. Heartbleed was widely reported and was considered a wake-up call for software developers, webmasters, and security specialists to get serious about fixing broken software and keeping systems up to date.
But according to a study by Venafi Labs, the Heartbleed cleanup remains unfinished. The study investigated servers for 1,639 companies around the world and found that 99% had checked and patched the actual Heartbleed flaw, but only 3% had made the effort to change their original private key. If any of these servers using the previous private key were subject to a Heartbleed attack prior to the patch, they are still vulnerable.
In an interview with The Register, Venafi VP Kevin Bocek explains, “Mopping up after an incident isn’t as simple as it used to be …. You can’t just stick a patch on it and call it done.”

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