The Branding of a Bug: How Heartbleed Became a Household Name
In the world of marketing, Heartbleed was a bloody masterpiece.
While it's standard practice for cyber-security companies to assign newly discovered Internet attacks with cloak-and-dagger-sounding names like Night Dragon and Operation Clandestine Fox, that's typically not the case for programming errors, which inherently aren't as sexy and are often quickly fixed after they're announced.
But this bug was different. Cyber-security firm Codenomicon spotted the hole on April 3 as part of ongoing work looking for gaps in OpenSSL, software that encrypts the communications between people's browsers and websites they visit, co-founder Mikko Varpiola said in an interview. The Finnish company has discovered other bugs in the software, but this one was exceptionally serious because it could allow hackers to silently steal data from target servers.
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