Heartbleed & Solarbotics

As I imagine most of you out there have heard by now, there's a pretty serious vulnerability in the OpenSSL that was announced on April 7th called CVE-2014-0160, better known as Heartbleed. For those of you wondering what the heck this "Heartbleed" thing is, awhile back OpenSSL added a "heartbeat" feature which allowed servers and computers with a secure connection to "ping" each other regularly, in order to keep the connection open. The problem comes from a bug in OpenSSL which lets a computer without the secure connection to still ping this way, and that connection could be exploited to include up to 64K chunks from the server's RAM, which unfortunately can include recently decrypted usernames, passwords, etc.

What Is Solarbotics Doing About it?
We've already taken steps to patch this hole on our own servers, and have reissued our EV SSL certificate (if you take a peek at the cert, you'll notice the validation date has been bumped up to 4/9/2014) which has already been installed. We've also cleared all existing sessions on the server as those were at risk as well. The unfortunate side effect of that is that anyone who had been building a cart without logging in will need to do so again.

What Should You Be Doing About it?
You should be giving strong consideration to resetting & updating all your passwords (yes seriously), particularly for the important things in your life like email, banking, facebook/twitter/reddit etc. This vulnerability was announced Monday, and if someone happened to pick up your login credentials before this was patched on one of the sites you visit, the attackers could still have your login credentials. We recommend opting for two-factor verification where ever possible. Of course, not using the same password for everything becomes an important part as well and for those of you worried about keeping track, we're big fans of Keepass here at Solarbotics.