By now, everyone has heard of the Heartbleed Bug and how it is affecting security all over the world.

Heartbleed explanation - from xkcd.comHow does it work?

Here is a comic that explains how it works.  It basically asks for various responses from your computer, and then tricks it by asking for something like Hat, but telling your computer that Hat has 500 letters, and your computer responds by giving the word hat, and then the next 500 characters after wherever it finds the word hat.  It then hopes that it gets some good information that you have, that comes after the word “hat”.

How to protect yourself.

Lots of Social Media companies, banks etc are contacting customers about changing their passwords.  Here is a great article from Mashable that gives those companies responses.  If in doubt, ask!

LastPass

If you have many, many passwords and either use the same password or have many and find it hard to remember them all, there is a company called Lastpass as LastPassword (you’ll ever need).  You can get a free version or an affordable version at lastpass.com.

Check sites you use

If you want to check individual sites to see if they have been affected, you can use this tool here.