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Report: NSA Exploited Heartbleed to Siphon Passwords for Two Years

The NSA knew about and exploited the Heartbleed vulnerability for two years before it was publicly exposed this week, and used it to steal account passwords and other data, according to a news report.

Speculation had been rampant this week that the spy agency might have known about the critical flaw in OpenSSL that would allow hackers to siphon passwords, email content and other data from the memory of vulnerable web servers and other systems using the important encryption protocol.

That speculation appears to be confirmed by two unnamed sources who told Bloomberg that the NSA discovered the flaw shortly after it was accidentally introduced into OpenSSl in 2012 by a programmer.

The flaw “became a basic part of the agency’s toolkit for stealing account passwords and other common tasks,” the publication reports. [See NSA response below]

OpenSSL is used by many websites and systems to encrypt traffic. The vulnerability doesn’t lie in the encryption itself, but in how the encrypted connection between a website and your computer is handled. On a scale of one to 10, cryptographer Bruce Schneier ranks the flaw an 11.

The flaw is critical because it’s at the core of SSL, the encryption protocol so many have trusted to protect their data, and can be used by hackers to steal usernames and passwords — for sensitive services like banking, ecommerce, and web-based email.