The Heartbleed Bug is a serious vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library. This weakness allows stealing the information protected, under normal conditions, by the SSL/TLS encryption used to secure the Internet. SSL/TLS provides communication security and privacy over the Internet for applications such as web, email, instant messaging (IM) and some virtual private networks (VPNs).

The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. This compromises the secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of the users and the actual content. This allows attackers to eavesdrop communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users.

It is highly recommended that you upgrade OpenSSL on all of your servers to one of the patched versions and also ensure that any other software using OpenSSL is patched as well. It would also be a good idea to revoke any private keys as this vulnerability has apparently been known for a couple years now.

You can fix the vulnerability with the following steps on RHEL based systems. Note that only 6.x versions need the patch; 5.x is safe.

yum update openssl -y

cagefsctl –force-update ( If the server has CloudLinux + CageFS )

SERVER_ROOT/admin/misc/lsup.sh -f -v 4.2.9 ( If the web server is LiteSpeed )

/etc/init.d/httpd stop
/etc/init.d/httpd start

Now, run the following command and restart all reported services. THIS IS IMPORTANT TO UNLOAD THE OLD LIBRARIES FROM CORRESPONDING SERVICES.

find /proc -maxdepth 2 -name maps -exec grep -HE ‘/libssl\.so.* \(deleted\)’ {} \; | cut -d/ -f3 | sort -u | xargs –no-run-if-empty ps uwwp