Headaches from Heartbleed: An Interview with Rebecca Wright

[April, 2014] Many of us have become desensitized to reports of personal data being disclosed or confidential corporate data being stolen. The frequency of such reports is high enough that their impact must be huge for an event to become newsworthy. When Heartbleed, as it is now called, was announced earlier this month, it was unmistakably news.

Heartbleed is a bug in the open-source OpenSSL cryptographic software library that is widely used to provide encryption for securing Internet transactions. The bug left vulnerable many widely used Internet applications for mail, social networking, and shopping.

In an interview with Rutgers Today, DIMACS Director and security researcher Rebecca Wright weighed in with her thoughts and advice on protecting yourself online.