By now you've undoubtedly heard of the “Heartbleed” bug, and may have heard everything from it being the end of the internet, to “oh you probably should change your password”. If you want to learn more about the process of how it went from “11 on a scale of one to ten” to just a really bad bug, I recommend you listen to TWiT (This Week in Tech) episode 453. It's quite interesting, actually.

For the tech scoop, you can catch up on heartbleed.com.

Anyway over here at ApertureExpert, it was patched the very same day the bug was revealed. We don't store credit card information here, so the in those few hours that we were knowingly vulnerable, only passwords could have been accessed, and that's only if you logged in during that time. Since the worst a hacker could do here is delete your posts or post something naughty in your name, [Reader Robert Sfeir pointed out on Twitter that if you use the same password (tsp tsk) everywhere, and your password was compromised here, you could have bigger issues] and ApertureExpert (as much as I hate to admit it) isn't one of the top 100 most popular sites on the internet, I think the odds of a breach are infinitesimally small. However if you logged in on April 7th, you may want to change your password if you're the super cautious sort!

Password managers

This is one of those reminders that using the same password everywhere is a bad, bad idea. If you're doing that, it's time to stop. Get yourself a password manager (I have been using 1Password [Mac and iOS] for years, and it's funny how many times I ask people “Do you use 1Password?” and they reply “yes, I use one password…”). This allows you to very easily have and manage a unique password for every single site on the internet, and have ludicrously complex passwords like proc$dE.oN+faN]rYd]celK+ats/erL*u{Gran*rAm.