A serious bug in OpenSSL was announced this afternoon known as the Heartbleed Bug.  An attacker, armed with the ability to exploit this bug is able to remotely read the contents of the memory of a vulnerably server.  This exposes the potential for an attacker to acquire the private key used to both encrypt the traffic and identify the server allowing them to eavesdrop on traffic as well as impersonate the server.  For a more in depth explanation of the bug and its affects see heartbleed.com  We have updated our servers with a local version of OpenSSL that disables Hearbeats to prevent an exploit pending new packages released by our OS upstream which fully resolves the issue.   -Kelsey

Update: April 8th, 17:35.  All affected public web and application servers received the fix from our OS upstream shortly after the original MOTD was posted yesterday.  Today, we’ve worked on wrapping up the upgrades on less critical systems and have reissued certificates for the bulk of the systems which had potentially exposed private keys. Ironically, we’re still waiting for all of our EV certs to be reissued.  The severity of this exploit can’t be underestimated as even earlier today Yahoo’s servers we’re still vulnerable exposing user names and passwords for the taking with little effort.  All users who run secure services should ensure that their systems are properly patched and consider having their certificates reissued by their CA.  -Kelsey and Grant