January 22, 2017
It’s more than two and half years since the discovery of the critical OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability, but the flaw is still alive as it appears that many organizations did not remediate properly to the serious security glitch.
It was one of the biggest flaws in the Internet’s history that affected the core security of as many as two-thirds of the world’s servers i.e. half a million servers at the time of its discovery in April 2014.
However, the critical bug still affects more than 199,500 systems even after 2 years and 9 months have already passed, according to a new report published today on Shodan, a search engine that scans for vulnerable devices.
Over 199,500 Systems Still Vulnerable to Heartbleed
Heartbleed (CVE-2014-0160) was a serious bug in the OpenSSL’s implementation of the TLS/DTLS heartbeat extension that allowed attackers to read portions of the affected server’s memory, potentially revealing users data that the server isn’t intended to reveal.
According to Shodan CEO John Matherly, about 199,500 services remain exploitable by the Heartbleed vulnerability due to unpatched OpenSSL instances.
The countries most affected by Heartbleed still remain the United States, followed by Korea, China, Germany, France, Russian Federation, United Kingdom, India Brazil and Italy.
Matherly discovered 42,032 heartbleed-exploitable services in the United States, 15,380 in Korea, 14,116 in China, and 14,072 services in Germany.
With top organizations vulnerable to the OpenSSL bug is SK Broadband and Amazon.com, and about 75,000 of the vulnerable services use expired SSL certificates and run Linux 3.x.