If you woke up today feeling like you lost something personal, there’s a good chance you did. Cloudfare, an online security service, recently revealed a fatal bug that had continuously leaked user information onto the web since roughly September 2016. The leak is currently being dubbed Cloudbleed.
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The Damage
Cloudfare reports that the worst of Cloudbleed occurred in February 2017 from the 13th to the 18th. The damage varies by service, but it could range from names to passwords to financial information. Because the leaked information was public, search engines like Google and Bing may have cached some of it.
At this time, the actual extent of the damage is unknown, but the bug has the potential to have a major impact. That’s because Cloudfare supplies services to nearly five and a half million websites.
How to Recover
So what do you do? Well, fortunately the worst of it is over. The bug was resolved within hours of the news. At this point, the best thing you can do to protect yourself is to start changing your passwords. We recommend you get a password manager as it will speed up the process.
Likewise, it’s probably worth it to enable two-factor authentication on all your internet accounts. If you want a more targeted approach, the GitHub community put together a list of sites
potentially affected by the bug. In addition, that list shares other ways to review your cyber security.
As always if you have questions or concerns, you can place them in the comments below. We’d love to start a dialogue as digital security is a big deal.
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