Your personal information may be at risk as a result of a major breakdown in internet security revealed on April 7th.
The damage caused by the “Heartbleed” bug is not known yet. The security hole exists on a large number of the internet’s web servers. It was undetected for more than two years. While it’s possible that the flaw was never discovered by hackers, no one can really tell.
Heartbleed affects the encryption technology used to protect online email accounts. The problem affects only the variant of SSL/TLS known as OpenSSL, but that is one of the most common on the Internet.
A fixed version of OpenSSL has been released, but not all websites have been updated with it. In order to protect yourself, you will need to change your passwords, but that won’t really help until the sites you are using start using the fixed version of OpenSSL.
It’s a good idea to be proactive with all of your accounts, be sure to monitor your bank and credit card statements on a regular basis and pull your free credit reports every year and review. Since you can pull each credit report once per year, what I do is space them out – pull one in January and then another one in May, and again in September.
Remember, when updating your passwords be sure to use a combination of upper and lowercase letters, symbols (if the website allows), and numbers. Don’t use the same password for all sites and don’t use your email or any other sensitive information as part of your password. You can read more about safe passwords here: https://bit.ly/1lwiMfF
You can actually run a scan yourself to see if a site is safe; simply go to: https://filippo.io/Heartbleed/
For more information see https://heartbleed.com/ and https://mashable.com/2014/04/09/heartbleed-bug-websites-affected/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link