Heartbleed Rises From The Dead To Threaten Us Once Again

Much like zombies from the hit TV show “The Walking Dead,” Heartbleed is back. A tool called Shodan was used to seek out internet-of-things (IoT) connected devices and figure out if they’re threatened by Heartbleed. Here’s what the owner of the company posted on his Twitter feed at the end of that search:

https://twitter.com/achillean/status/643706828057018368/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Of the 200,000 or so vulnerable devices, 57,272 were housed in the United States. Germany was second with 21,060 Heartbleed-prone devices and China had 11,300. France was fourth with 10,094 followed by the UK with 9,125. Chances are these are things like home routers, Internet cameras, Internet connected light switches and the like. If you factor in the fact that this is a year after Heartbleed freaked people out, one wonders why we’re still taking about it and why people haven’t secured themselves from Heartbleed. That of course assumes that updates that address this are available. For older devices that may not be the case. Thus it may be possible that we’ll always have devices that are prone to getting pwned via Heartbleed on the Internet forever. That’s something that we may live to regret.

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