Visionary sites not at risk of Heartbleed

While a critical Internet security vulnerability may have left many web users scrambling to safeguard themselves from data theft over the weekend, Visionary clients can rest assured that their websites and personal information have not been compromised and continue to be well protected.

The bug, nicknamed Heartbleed, is essentially a hole that lets malicious hackers view and steal bits of information about someone that would normally be guarded, such as credit card data, social security numbers, usernames, and account passwords.

Facebook, Pinterest, Google and Yahoo are just a few of the sites that were once vulnerable and are now requesting that their users change their account passwords to remain protected.

While media reports about Heartbleed created a nationwide panic early last week, it is important to note that sites hosted and maintained by Visionary were never susceptible to any threat.

Visionary’s client servers run on a Linux operating system called CentOS at version 5.9, which is not affected by Heartbleed. The only CentOS version that has shown to be vulnerable is CentOS version 6.5.

Meanwhile, five Visionary servers were updated with a recommended patch that was released on Tuesday, April 8. But the main system had been updated and protected well before widespread knowledge of the Heartbleed issue.

For precautionary reasons only, Visionary also performed a re-key of its wildcard SSL certificate and replaced it on all of the servers where it had been previously installed.

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, an encryption protocol that allows data to be securely transferred from a single domain through the Internet. Similarly, a wildcard SSL certificate covers not only the website domain but all of its subdomains as well.

A website owner or hosting provider can purchase a SSL certificate on a yearly basis, although two-year and three-year certificates are available.

For more information about the Heartbleed bug and how it may have affected other websites you commonly use, please visit www.Heartbleed.com.