heartbleedWhat was all the news about Heartbleed?? It’s a pretty serious security bug that affects a huge portion of websites and means that your password and other information could be transmitted invisibly.  Websites are moving quickly to get it patched, but what should you do to protect yourself? I thought Dashlane, the password manager I use, had pretty good advice: “In an ideal world, you should change all of your passwords now and then again in 10 days when sites have patched the bug and issued new SSL certificates. In order to be as fully protected as possible, we’re in the process of emailing our users to advise the following:

  1. Immediately change the passwords for the accounts that are most critical to you (for example, your bank, your PayPal account, your email accounts…) by generating strong unique passwords using Dashlane
  2. Wait for an additional 10 days before changing any other passwords.  You need to make sure all these sites have fixed the problem before changing your passwords
  3. In 10 days, go back to all your critical accounts and change the passwords a second time by generating strong unique passwords using Dashlane
  4. Then change all of the passwords of your less critical accounts in the same way.”

Changing a lot of passwords can be a real pain. If you do have a lot of them, you might try giving Dashlane a try. It makes it a lot easier, and it’s free!