The Heartbleed Bug and Why Your Website Is Safe

Published 04/16/2014

As many of you have no doubt heard, the internet has been buzzing about a severe vulnerability referred to as the "Heartbleed Bug". This post is a quick explanation of why it does NOT affect any of our clients.

First, a quick summary of what the Heartbleed Bug is. The following is taken from heartbleed.com:

The Heartbleed Bug is a serious vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library. This weakness allows stealing the information protected, under normal conditions, by the SSL/TLS encryption used to secure the Internet. SSL/TLS provides communication security and privacy over the Internet for applications such as web, email, instant messaging (IM) and some virtual private networks (VPNs).

The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. This compromises the secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of the users and the actual content. This allows attackers to eavesdrop on communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users.

Sound scary? Well it is. The panic is fully justified because it potentially exposes confidential, sensitive information to the most inexperienced of hackers. This is of particular concern to e-commerce sites.

I am happy to announce, however, that none of the websites that we host for clients are vulnerable to this bug. Our servers are Microsoft Windows based, and Windows servers run their own proprietary SSL stack. As a result, we do not install or run the software involved in the Heartbleed Bug.

We are available to answer any further questions or concerns you might have regarding this topic. Feel free to contact us via your dashboard or by phone at any time.