Atlanta IT Company, Magnicom, Announces Heartbleed Network Consultations
Atlanta, Georgia (PRWEB) April 30, 2014 -- Without proper network structures, vulnerabilities in the world of IT never seem to diminish. Recently, a new technology bug came into the limelight, Heartbleed. Heartbleed is a shortcoming to OpenSSL, an encryption technology used widely across the internet. Some reports estimate that Heartbleed effected up to 2/3's of websites secured with OpenSSL technology across the entire world. With such a large scale of potentially effected websites and customer data, Magnicom, among the best Atlanta IT companies, announced free network consultations to review the potential vulnerabilities of companies.
Magnicom is a managed services provider of computer tech support, server management, and outsourced network support in Georgia. Having been in the business of providing IT consulting in Atlanta since 2002, mitigating the negative impacts of Heartbleed is all in a days work. The announcement of their free Heartbleed consultations will help small to medium businesses understand if they, or their clients, have been impacted by Heartbleed, and to what extent.
There is no such thing as a perfect software and nothing is ever really impervious. Even what is assumed to be invulnerable will eventually meet its match -- just like how OpenSSL finally meets its biggest shortcoming: Heartbleed. OpenSSL was originally developed for great reasons. It provided, and still does, high scale data encryption of approximately 66% of all servers positioned online. Unfortunately, after Heartbleed's exposure, the contents of servers are now subject to unwanted public access.
Why Heartbleed Is Bigger A Problem Than Some Believe
Heartbleed has the capacity to reveal even the tiniest bits of data within the server's memory; that would include the threshold to which all or most sensitive data is stored:
- customers names
- address
- phone numbers
- emails
That would even encompass private data, like usernames and passwords, credit card and bank account information, and so the list goes on. With this bug snooping around, hackers and bots alike are unfortunately capable of accessing user accounts into to deceive people into the usage of bogus versions of various websites through the process known as "phishing." This means that it is not only unfortunate that data has been compromised, but much more data can be compromised. Even though the announcement of Heartbleed is relatively new, its actual discovery was earlier than was publicly announced. The originally unearthing of this mendacious worm was actually from last March, but then it was only disseminated to the bigger audience April the 7th, 2014, Monday, and by a Google Security Team member and software security group called the Codenomicon. According to their reports, the bug has the capacity to affect web servers operating under Nginx and Apache software, and it is not only able to reveal stored information, but also real-time web mails and instant messages.
Open source technologies like OpenSSL are not bad. In fact, they offer dynamic, cost-effective solutions to large user groups. An open source software is something that is integrated with collaborative, collective work between different developers in different locations. This allows for fluid development, varying perspectives, improved testing, and other benefits. Open source also allows better security measures to be incorporated as they surface. Unfortunately, Heartbleed is evidently not constrained by open source's strengths.
Security defenselessness come as it goes. However, Heartbleed proves to be an extremely serious matter to handle. Not only does this bug require drastic changes for websites, it could also obligate anybody -- who has been using them -- to modify their passwords and sensitive data, too. While patches for the vulnerability are starting to surface, it is better for businesses to tackle the issue directly and recruit services from professional network security companies, like Magnicom. For more information about Magnicom's consulting services, please visit magnicom.net or call 678-727-7270.
Neil Smith, Magnicom, http://www.magnicom.net, +1 678-727-7270 Ext: 1, [email protected]
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