Protecting yourself from what is being called the Heartbleed bug is an important issue. Here is some information to protect yourself from this bug.
Monday night a major website vulnerability that has been named Heartbleed has the chance to affect the entire operations of the Internet. With more than 500,000 servers at risk according to research firm Netcraft. Your first step is stop logging in to affected servers like Yahoo and OKCupid until the problem is patched. The “all clear” status is to be issued for any affecting services by late this weekend.
Wait for confirmation of the fixes from these website before changing your password or it may not do you any good. After you receive an email confirmation or see in the news that the account you have on one of the affecting website is safe, change your password and setup two factor authentication if it is offered.
Start emailing smaller websites that you have accounts with to make them aware of the problem if you have not heard anything from them. You are responsible for keeping your data safe and to alert everyone of this issue, including websites you come in contact with.
Over the next few days keep your eyes on your bank accounts and financial statements. Hackers can still gain access to unpatched servers and steal credit card information. Yahoo is being hit the hardest with their services like Search, Portal, Finance, Mail, Tumblr, and Flickr. If you have a Yahoo account you will definitely want to change your password after they patch.
Most of the work is in the hands of the web server owners who are busy patching systems. Remember to change your passwords for all of the websites you have an account at on Monday for extra safety from the Heartbleed bug.