Poll: Dark Reading Community Acts On Heartbleed

It will be some time before the full impact of the Heartbleed bug will be known, but in the Dark Reading security community, members are not dragging their feet about remedial action, according to our recent online flash poll Broken Heartbeat.

The danger was perceived immediately. "If you can spoof the server and step in as if you were that server, from a malicious standpoint, there is no end to the data that will be compromised," RyanSepe observed in a comment on our breaking story, Emergency SSL/TLS Patching Under Way. In the days since, more than 260 of you have weighed in on the steps your companies are taking to prevent cyberspies and criminals from gaining access to personal data on servers, networks, and devices through the flawed OpenSSL "Heartbeat" function of TLS.

Our poll allowed respondents to choose as many of the five responses as applied to their mitigation strategy. Six out of 10 of our respondents report that they have already installed the Heartbeat fix on their servers or are in the process of doing so. Only about 40 percent said they are replacing digital certificates.

The issue of what to do about passwords was raised by many readers, both on a personal level and in relation to the need to safeguard others' personal data on corporate servers. "As a developer I find it appalling that companies are not instituting a password black list for the 100 most common passwords by now," wrote jaingverda on Emergency SSL/TLS Patching Under Way. Yet, in our poll, only 30 percent of respondents said their organizations are requiring end users to change their passwords.

Not surprisingly, fewer than 8 percent of respondents said they are doing nothing about Heartbleed. But I take with a grain of salt the 17 percent who checked "What's Heartbleed?" -- a tongue-in-cheek response we included to underscore the fact that we recognize the limits of our online poll; it's anecdotal information, not pure research.

That said, I hope we can flesh out these data points with more detail in ongoing discussions. To quote Ed Moyle in a comment titled "Tip of the iceberg IMHO:"

"What really concerns me is less the population of web servers that this impacts -- because, impactful as that is, they can at least upgrade fairly easily. What really makes me nervous is what else is vulnerable that can't be upgraded quite so easily. This code is in a lot of stuff, in particular embedded systems. Mark my words -- we'll be dealing with this one for a while."

I couldn't agree more. Let's begin by chatting about what strategies have been effective for you so far and what challenges have you stumped. And, if you still want to add your two cents to the online poll, it's still live, so click here.