(MENAFN- Kuwait News Agency (KUNA)) The White House on Friday denied any link to the widespread cybersecurity flaw 'Heartbleed,' which came to light earlier this week after being discovered by an IT firm in Finland
Heartbleed was identified as a vulnerability that exposes passwords and banking information online. The data is usually scrambled to protect users, in many cases using a protocol called OpenSSL, which can be identified by a small padlock image in a browser's address bar
Both Google and Finnish company Codenomicon said on Monday that 'Heartbleed' had existed in OpenSSL for two years, which led to a Bloomberg News report saying that the National Security Agency (NSA) had again been caught spying on US citizens
"Reports that NSA or any other part of the government was aware are wrong," said National Security Council Spokesperson Caitlin Hayden in a statement. "The Federal government was not aware of the recently identified vulnerability in OpenSSL until it was made public in a private sector cybersecurity report
"If the Federal government, including the intelligence community, had discovered this vulnerability prior to last week, it would have been disclosed to the community responsible," she added
Popular websites such as Yahoo, Tumblr, and Dropbox were all exposed to 'Heartbleed,' and alerted their users on Tuesday that they had applied a fix, urging them to change their passwords
Several US banks also urged their customers to change passwords, a request echoed by the Department of Homeland Security.
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