Update: Errata Security's Robert Graham has acknowledged that he was mistaken in his assessment, and that private keys could be at risk. The original story below has been marked up accordingly.
There’s good news, bad news, and worse news regarding the “Heartbleed” bug that affected nearly two-thirds of the Internet’s servers dependent on SSL encryption. The good news is that many of those servers (well, about a third) have already been patched. And according to analysis by Robert Graham of Errata Security, the bug won’t expose the private encryption key for servers “in most software" (though others have said several web server distributions are vulnerable to giving up the key under certain circumstances.)
The bad news is that about 600,000 servers are still vulnerable to attacks exploiting the bug. The worse news is that malicious “bot” software may have been attacking servers with the vulnerability for some time—in at least one case, traces of the attack have been found in audit logs dating back to last November. Attacks based on the exploit could date back even further.
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