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On Monday, April 7, 2014, the information security community received news about a vulnerability in the OpenSSL (Open Secure Socket Layers) cryptographic library called the “Heartbleed” bug that can allow hackers the ability to collect passwords, credit cards numbers, private keys and other data on servers that operated the software.

OpenSSL is a very popular tool used on many websites such as LinkedIn, FaceBook, Gmail and many others sites and it is estimated about two-thirds of all websites on the Internet were exposed to this vulnerability for the past two years.

Many security professionals and researcher are describing the Heartbleed bug as one of the biggest security threats the Internet has ever been exposed too and should be taken very seriously.

The main issues with the event stems from the time duration of the vulnerability was in place in conjunction with the vulnerability being unknown for so long. Furthermore, companies do not know if their users were affected by the OpenSLL vulnerability because exploitation of the bug would have left no trace of occurrence.

The positive side of this matter is a patch was released that got rid of the vulnerability, but it is imperative users conduct the following tasks to ensure their security and privacy:

Change your passwords immediately.
Do not use the same passwords on multiple online identities.

To check and see if a site you use or plan to use is or was vulnerable to the Heartbleed vulnerability use one of the links below:

http://filippo.io/Heartbleed/

https://lastpass.com/heartbleed/

Also, below is a quick reference chart courtesy of Mashable.com.

Social Networks

	Was it affected?	Is there a patch?	Do you need to change your password?	What did they say?
Facebook	Unclear	Yes	Yes Yes	“We added protections for Facebook’s implementation of OpenSSL before this issue was publicly disclosed. We haven’t detected any signs of suspicious account activity, but we encourage people to … set up a unique password.”
LinkedIn	No	No	No	“We didn’t use the offending implementation of OpenSSL in www.linkedin.com or www.slideshare.net. As a result, HeartBleed does not present a risk to these web properties.”
Tumblr	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“We have no evidence of any breach and, like most networks, our team took immediate action to fix the issue.”
Twitter	Unclear	Unclear	Unclear	Twitter wrote that OpenSSL “is widely used across the internet and at Twitter. We were able to determine that [our] servers were not affected by this vulnerability. We are continuing to monitor the situation.”Twitter has not yet responded to Mashable‘s request for comment.

Other Companies

	Was it affected?	Is there a patch?	Do you need to change your password?	What did they say?
Apple	Unclear	Unclear	Unclear	Apple has not yet responded to a request for comment.
Amazon	No	No	No	“Amazon.com is not affected.”
Google	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes*	“We have assessed the SSL vulnerability and applied patches to key Google services.” Search, Gmail, YouTube, Wallet, Play, Apps and App Engine were affected; Google Chrome and Chrome OS were not.*Google said users do not need to change their passwords, but because of the previous vulnerability, better safe than sorry.
Microsoft	No	No	No	Microsoft services were not running OpenSSL, according to LastPass.
Yahoo	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“As soon as we became aware of the issue, we began working to fix it… and we are working to implement the fix across the rest of our sites right now.” Yahoo Homepage, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Food, Yahoo Tech, Flickr and Tumblr were patched. More patches to come, Yahoo says.

Email

	Was it affected?	Is there a patch?	Do you need to change your password?	What did they say?
AOL	No	No	No	AOL told Mashable it was not running the vulnerable version of the software.
Gmail	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes*	“We have assessed the SSL vulnerability and applied patches to key Google services.”*Google said users do not need to change their passwords, but because of the previous vulnerability, better safe than sorry.
Hotmail / Outlook	No	No	No	Microsoft services were not running OpenSSL, according to LastPass.
Yahoo Mail	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“As soon as we became aware of the issue, we began working to fix it… and we are working to implement the fix across the rest of our sites right now.”

Stores and Commerce

	Was it affected?	Is there a patch?	Do you need to change your password?	What did they say?
Amazon	No	No	No	“Amazon.com is not affected.”
Amazon Web Services (for website operators)	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	Most services were unaffected or Amazon was already able to apply mitigations (see advisory note here). Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon EC2, Amazon Linux AMI, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, AWS OpsWorks, AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon CloudFront were patched.
eBay	Unclear	Unclear	Unclear	“The vast majority of our services were not impacted and our users can continue to shop securely on our marketplace.”
GoDaddy	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“We’ve been updating GoDaddy services that use the affected OpenSSL version.” Full Statement
PayPal	No	No	No	“Your PayPal account details were not exposed in the past and remain secure.” Full Statement
Target	No	No	No	“[We] launched a comprehensive review of all external facing aspects of Target.com… and do not currently believe that any external-facing aspects of our sites are impacted by the OpenSSL vulnerability.”

Banks and Brokerages

	Was it affected?	Is there a patch?	Do you need to change your password?	What did they say?
Bank of America	No	No	No	“We’re currently taking precautions and steps to protect customer data from this threat and have no reason to believe any customer data has been compromised in the past.”
Chase	No	No	No	“These sites don’t use the encryption software that is vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug.”
*ETrade**	No	No	No	E*Trade is still investigating.
Fidelity	No	No	No	“We have multiple layers of security in place to protect our customer sites and services.”
PNC	No	No	No	“We have tested our online and mobile banking systems and confirmed that they are not vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug.”
Schwab	No	No	No	“Efforts to date have not detected this vulnerability on Schwab.com or any of our online channels.”
Scottrade	No	No	No	“Scottrade does not use the affected version of OpenSSL on any of our client-facing platforms.”
TD Ameritrade	No	No	No	TD Ameritrade “doesn’t use the versions of openSSL that were vulnerable.”
TD Bank	No	No	No	“We’re currently taking precautions and steps to protect customer data from this threat and have no reason to believe any customer data has been compromised in the past.”
U.S. Bank	No	No	No	“We do not use OpenSSL for customer-facing, Internet banking channels, so U.S. Bank customer data is NOT at risk.”
Wells Fargo	No	No	No	No reason provided.

Government and Taxes

	Was it affected?	Is there a patch?	Do you need to change your password?	What did they say?
1040.com	No	No	No	“We’re not vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug, as we do not use OpenSSL.”
FileYour Taxes.com	No	No	No	“We continuously patch our servers to keep them updated. However, the version we use was not affected by the issue, so no action was taken.”
H&R Block	Unclear	No	Unclear	“We are reviewing our systems and currently have found no risk to client data from this issue.”
Healthcare .gov	Unclear	Unclear	Unclear	Healthcare.gov has not yet responded to a request for comment.
Intuit (TurboTax)	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	Turbotax “has examined its systems and has secured TurboTax to protect against the “Heartbleed” bug.” Full Statement
IRS	Unclear	Unclear	Unclear	“The IRS continues to accept tax returns as normal … and systems continue operating and are not affected by this bug. We are not aware of any security vulnerabilities related to this situation.”

Other

	Was it affected?	Is there a patch?	Do you need to change your password?	What did they say?
Dropbox	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	On Twitter: “We’ve patched all of our user-facing services & will continue to work to make sure your stuff is always safe.”
Evernote	No	No	No	“Evernote’s service, Evernote apps, and Evernote websites … all use non-OpenSSL implementations of SSL/TLS to encrypt network communications.” Full Statement
LastPass	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“Though LastPass employs OpenSSL, we have multiple layers of encryption to protect our users and never have access to those encryption keys.”
Minecraft	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“We were forced to temporary suspend all of our services. … The exploit has been fixed. We can not guarantee that your information wasn’t compromised.” More Information
Netflix	Unclear	Unclear	Unclear	“Like many companies, we took immediate action to assess the vulnerability and address it. We are not aware of any customer impact.”
OKCupid	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“We, like most of the Internet, were stunned that such a serious bug has existed for so long and was so widespread.”
SoundCloud	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“We will be signing out everyone from their SoundCloud accounts … and when you sign back in, the fixes we’ve already put in place will take effect.”
Spark Networks (JDate, Christian Mingle)	No	No	No	Sites do not use OpenSSL.
Wunderlist	Yes	Yes	Yes Yes	“You’ll have to simply log back into Wunderlist. We also strongly recommend that you reset your password for Wunderlist.” Full Statement

I had the opportunity to review and conduct some interesting hands-on examples from Packt Publishing’s “Cuckoo Malware Analysis” by Digit Oktavianto and Iqbal Muhardianto. This book was divided into five intuitive chapters consisting of:

Preface
Chapter 1: Getting Started with Automated Malware Analysis
using Cuckoo Sandbox
Chapter 2: Using Cuckoo Sandbox to Analyze a Sample Malware
Chapter 3: Analyzing the Output of Cuckoo Sandbox
Chapter 4: Reporting with Cuckoo Sandbox
Chapter 5: Tips and Tricks for Cuckoo Sandbox
Index

In chapter one, titled “Getting Started with Automated Malware Analysis
using Cuckoo Sandbox” provided information pertaining to malware analysis methodologies, basic theory in Sandboxing and detailed information on installing the Cuckoo Sandbox framework. The process was not easy, but if directions are followed precisely, then outcome should be favorable. In chapter two “Using Cuckoo Sandbox to Analyze a Sample Malware”, the authors discussed the process of starting Cuckoo as well as submitting various malware samples such as MS Word, MS Excel and PDF documents. In addition, examples to submitting malicious URL, binary files and conducting memory forensics were also demonstrated.

Chapter three “Analyzing the Output of Cuckoo Sandbox” and Chapter four “Reporting with Cuckoo Sandbox”, covered using the processing module and analyzing an APT attack. In addition, the process to creating a built-in reports and exporting data report analysis from Cuckoo to another format were covered.

The last chapter, “Tips and Tricks for Cuckoo Sandbox” pertained informative information about hardening Cuckoo Sandbox against VM detection and other interesting tips I was not to concerned about as a novice in the craft of malware analysis.

Overall, I thought the book was well written as a hybrid tool to learning the process of conducting malware analysis. Chapter one, provided the necessary foundation about malware analysis, while the remaining chapter provided detailed instructions to installing, conducting and reporting malware analysis.

I found this text to be very useful and beneficial for anyone task in conducting the process of malware analysis. In addition, I this text would also provide valuable value in academia as a supplemental text or lab manual.

You can get additional information as well as purchase the book at Packt Publishing website here.

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The HeartBleed Vulnerability: The Next Step for Users

Cuckoo Malware Analysis by Digit Oktavianto and Iqbal Muhardianto: A Review

The HeartBleed Vulnerability: The Next Step for Users

Cuckoo Malware Analysis by Digit Oktavianto and Iqbal Muhardianto: A Review

Full Sized Blog Element (Big Preview Pic)

The HeartBleed Vulnerability: The Next Step for Users

Social Networks

Other Companies

Email

Stores and Commerce

Banks and Brokerages

Government and Taxes

Other

Cuckoo Malware Analysis by Digit Oktavianto and Iqbal Muhardianto: A Review

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