With technology increasing its influence in everyone’s lives, vulnerabilities in the infrastructure can lead to drastic events. One of the most prominently named flaws to happen in this decade was the Heartbleed vulnerability. Headlines were plastered with fantastical fear with the usage of the word Heartbleed. Even though this flaw was significant, it was mostly blown out of proportion by the non-technology-centered news media.
Most normal people do not try to understand what the Heartbleed vulnerability is about or its cause. According to Greg Kumparak of TechCrunch, Heartbleed is a vulnerability in the OpenSSL standard of internet encryption. It is widely used in many web infrastructures. The tech company, Apache, uses OpenSSL in its servers, which comprise of around fifty percent of the internet (Kumparak). The main dilemma with this vulnerability was that there was a hole in the OpenSSL standard. Hackers could intercept traffic and decrypt the data from the intercepted traffic without detection (Kumparak). Sensitive data from innocent internet users were able to be taken unnoticed. In an interview with Mashable, the programmer behind the flaw, Robin Seggelman, talked about his …show more content…
However, a realization came to many tech companies that such vulnerabilities are a common enemy. This led to the creation of the “Core Infrastructure Initiative”, which comprises of “Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Qualcomm, VMware and The Linux Foundation” (Lardinois). This group will provide funds to those willing to work full time in internet infrastructure to analyze for future bugs and vulnerabilities before they become widespread. Most of analysis will go toward open source projects “in need of assistance” (Lardinois). Open source’s fluidity with modification allowed this alliance to form easily with no problems, leading into a stronger back-end for the