LASER Pulse! #3 – The Heartbleed

LASER: Materials Science Podcast

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This week’s LASER Pulse! is about the Heartbleed computer vulnerability. We cover the basics of the heartbleed bug, why its important, and mention that you really need to CHANGE YOUR PASSWORDS. Because this is a Pulse episode, there are little to no edits (just the intro and outro really), and the whole show is only about 20 minutes.

No real show notes, just a list of a bunch of links if you want to know more.

Here are links to Sam’s Blog and her Twitter.

• Our Guest, Samantha, wrote about “Heartbleed for people who don’t know computers good (and want to learn to do other stuff good too)”
• XKCD Has a great basic explanation in comic-form
• This Video is the most high-level description of the bug I could find. It is really neat.
• Here is a link to the first program that allowed millions (maybe more) of people to to gather as much secure data as possible. It probably won’t work anymore since most servers should be patched by now, but if you have your own server you can install the old version of OpenSSL to test it out.
• Most importantly, THIS LIST is the list of major passwords that you need to change RIGHT NOW. It doesn’t include small websites, and if you used the same password on any two sites, they are now both compromised!
• Don’t think hackers aren’t smart enough to write programs to try the same password, username, and email addresses on even websites that weren’t affected by this! Even if you use small variations of your password, it makes it much easier to crack if someone has part of it.

Be safe online!