Heartbleed is one of those things that became a media monster darling. Everyone is making this out to be the end of the Internet — but as of now there hasn’t been a single confirmed case of anyone siphoning user data using Heartbleed — except for the NSA. Wouldn’t it be something if it were discovered that the NSA actually created the heartbleed bug? Nah, they didn’t, but they may have been exploiting it to collect user data. And that’s bad in two ways:
1. If they knew of it two years ago they should have realeased the information.
2. If they have been using it to tap into peoples’ data without due process, that’s wrong.
Now there are some who say that the patches for Heartbleed don’t work. And other who say that the sites set up to tell you if a site has been patched for Heartbleed are not reliable. Who knows?
It seems everyone is promising to keep you safer in the age of Heartbleed. We’re betting, while no doubt this is a serious problem, it is being overblown by the press – and when it’s all said and done, Heartbleed will be just another crisis noted with an asterisk in the history of the Internet – there have been dozens of others.
Anyway, for those of you looking for a way to tell if a site has been patched against the Heartbleed Bug, here is a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome. We are not aware of any similar add-ons or extensions for Internet Explorer.
Chromebleed for Chrome browser (Free)
Displays a warning if the site you are browsing is affected by the Heartbleed bug. Also displays warnings on Google search results.
NEW in version 2: the Heartbleed icon is added to Google search results where the site is still affected by the Heartbleed bug. A bleeding heart icon is placed in the browser menu bar. If you happen upon a site that is not patch, you’ll get warning via a popup. You’ll also see a popup indicating the site is “safe”.
This extension does not work right out of the box — you have to go its options and set it to show all notifications or you’ll see nothing but the Heartbleed icon in the toolbar. We tested it and it seems to work – whether the information it shows is correct, is something we, nor anyone else, knows.
You can get Chromebleed here.
Heartbleed-Ext 3.0 for Firefox browser (Free)
The Firefox version works differently than the Chrome extension. In Chrome a popup appears telling you if a site is suspect or if it’s good. In Firefox the toolbar “Heart”is green on sites which are “safe” and red on sites which have not been patched and therefore deemed “unsafe”
