I’m sure you all have heard now about the ‘Heartbleed’ security bug, however, many of you might not know what it means or what it is. The Heartbleed security bug makes individuals all across the web vulnerable to having their passwords, credit card information, and other sensitive data stolen. According to Netcraft, an Internet research firm, the bug has affected about 500,000 servers.

Here are a couple of tips you should use to make sure your information is safe:
  1. Don’t log into accounts from afflicted sites. Be sure to check before you log in that the company has fixed the problem. You can check individual sites here to see if they are vulnerable to the bug. If you’re still not sure if the company is safe, contact them. Here is a list of sites that are not vulnerable and have been patched.
  2. Change Passwords to your Accounts. Once you get word that the company’s site is no longer vulnerable create a new password for that site. Additionally it’s a good idea to change your passwords for sites that weren’t affected as well.
To protect yourself even more, you should always change your passwords every 90 days and your passwords should be different across sites for extra security.

Sierra swiftly verified its internal systems on April 9th and initiated scans on customer systems at the same time, well before most vendors ever realized that a vulnerability was published.