Cybersecurity experts discover lapses in Heartbleed bug fix

A detailed analysis by cybersecurity experts from the University of Maryland found that website administrators nationwide tasked with patching security holes exploited by the Heartbleed bug may not have done enough.

First disclosed in April 2014, Heartbleed presents a serious vulnerability to the popular OpenSSL (Secure Sockets Layer) software, allowing anyone on the Internet to read the memory of systems that are compromised by the malicious bug.

Assistant Research Scientist Dave Levin and Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Tudor Dumitras were part of a team that analyzed the most popular websites in the United States -- more than one million sites were examined -- to better understand the extent to which systems administrators followed specific protocols to fix the problem.