Twitter reportedly not affected by Heartbleed bug

Twitter was not affected by the Internet security threat Heartbleed. First spotted by PCWorld , Twitter has issued a statement on its Status page that reads, “On 4/7/2014 we were made aware of a critical vulnerability in OpenSSL (CVE-2014-0160), the security library that is widely used across the internet and at Twitter. We were able to determine that twitter.com and api.twitter.com servers were not affected by this vulnerability. We are continuing to monitor the situation.”   Heartbleed is an Internet bug that has exposed millions of passwords, credit card numbers and other sensitive bits of information to potential theft by computer hackers who may have been secretly exploiting the problem before its discovery. The problem affects only the variant of SSL/TLS known as OpenSSL, but that happens to be one of the most common on the Internet.   Lamar Bailey, director of security research for security vendor Tripwire reportedly said, “Twitter subscribers may not need to take the extra few minutes to change their passwords as they go through updating their other accounts in the wake of the disclosure.” He further said that Twitter may have “dodged the bullet by running a different version of SSL or by turning off the vulnerable feature in OpenSSL.”   The report also claims that no version of Android was affected, except limited Android 4.1.1 version, according to Google. Other companies like Yahoo, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have reportedly said either they are studying the problem or have fixed it on their sites.   Although there is now a way to close the security hole, there are still plenty of reasons to be concerned, said David Chartier, CEO of Codenomicon. A small team from the Finnish security firm diagnosed Heartbleed while working independently from another Google Inc. researcher who also discovered the threat.   “I would change every password everywhere because it’s possible something was sniffed out,” said Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer for Qualys, a maker of security-analysis software had said earlier . “You don’t know because an attack wouldn’t have left a distinct footprint.”   But changing the passwords won’t do any good, these experts have been saying, until the affected services install the software released Monday to fix the problem. That puts the onus on the Internet services affected by Heartbleed to alert their users to the potential risks and let them know when the Heartbleed fix has been installed so they can change their passwords.   About two-thirds of Web servers rely on OpenSSL, Chartier had said earlier. That means the information passing through hundreds of thousands of websites could be vulnerable, despite the protection offered by encryptions. Beside emails and chats, OpenSSL is also used to secure virtual private networks, which are used by employees to connect with corporate networks seeking to shield confidential information from prying eyes.   Here’s what you need to know about Heartbleed .   (With inputs from news agency)