Stopping the Heartbleeding

You may have already heard about an important security vulnerability called Heartbleed (CVE-2014–0160) which appears to affect up to two-thirds of all Internet sites.

While experts continue to debate the severity and extent of the heartbleed vulnerability, we want to assure you that Space Monkey began moving to neutralize any potential threats literally within minutes of the vulnerability being announced. For more information on what steps providers like us can take to combat this issue, please see our blog post Heartbleeding OpenSSL Checklist.

Even though we have no reason to believe that any part of our service was compromised as a result of the Heartbleed vulnerability, we recommend all of our users follow best recommended practices, including resetting their passwords, which can be done here. As always, it is best to use separate passwords for each service you access.

Web and Desktop Apps

You may have also noticed that you have been signed out of your desktop, web, and mobile clients. We recommend that you quit out of each of these apps, then sign back in with a new, heartbleed-immune secure session.

iOS Space Monkey App

For iOS clients, you may see an error stating that you are no longer signed in. Simply click on “unlink” then re-open the app to sign back in. If you have auto-upload turned on, you may notice that the app tries to re-upload your photos/videos — but don’t worry! The actual files won’t be re-uploaded. The app is simply churning through all the files on your mobile device to make sure they are already stored in Space Monkey. The process should not take very long to complete.

Android Space Monkey App

For Android clients, the same is true. You will need to sign out and then sign back in. You can do this by going into your Android Settings App -> Accounts and selecting “Space Monkey,” then from the menu select “Remove account.” You may also need to “Force stop” the app from Android Settings -> Apps. Once you have done this, opening up the Space Monkey app will let you sign back in. Alternatively, you can simply uninstall the Space Monkey app and then re-install it.

Keeping your data safe and private is of paramount importance to the entire Space Monkey team.

Originally published on April 11th, 2014 by @alenp