A new deadly security vulnerability has been discovered in OpenSSL that affects more than 11 Million modern websites and e-mail services protected by an ancient, long deprecated transport layer security protocol, Secure Sockets Layer.

Dubbed DROWN, the highly critical security hole in OpenSSL was disclosed today as a low-cost attack that could decrypt your sensitive, secure HTTPS communications, including passwords and credit card details and that too in a matter of hours or in some cases almost immediately, a team of 15 security researchers from various universities and the infosec community warned Tuesday.

Heartbleed. Shellshock. And now Venom. The names for cyber vulnerabilities keep getting scarier. But the latest threat, dubbed Venom, isn't going to cause as much trouble as the hype might lead you to believe.

While Venom has the potential to cause widespread catastrophe, it's unlikely to cause the same mess as Heartbleed because fixes are already taking place, security researchers say. "You've got a lot of scrambling going on, but I think this will go away sooner than later because people will respond pretty quickly to remediate and patch this," said Joe Loomis, founder and CEO of CyberSponse.

In what seems like the most impactful security vulnerability since the OpenSSL Heartbleed affair, a new Internet-wide bug emerged this week in the Bourne again shell (Bash).

While its true severity remains unknown, the Bash vulnerability (also known as “shell shock”) is being talked about everywhere, and you may have even seen your local news anchors discussing the story in front of a green-screen covered in fast-scrolling computer code on last night’s evening news. Bash is present in a very large number of Web-servers and in-home appliances. What is Bash?

As many of you may have already been aware, a breach at Community Health Systems (CHS) affecting an estimated 4.5 million patients was recently revealed. TrustedSec obtained the first details on how the breach occured and new information relating to this breach.

The initial attack vector was through the infamous OpenSSL “heartbleed” vulnerability which led to the compromise of the information. This confirmation of the initial attack vector was obtained from a trusted and anonymous source close to the CHS investigation. Attackers were able to glean user credentials from memory on a CHS Juniper device via the heartbleed vulnerability.

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.

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. 

Tens of millions of servers were exposed to a security vulnerability called “Heartbleed” in OpenSSL, software used to encrypt much of the internet. While an emergency patch has been released, sites like Yahoo have raced to fortify security. 

The open-source OpenSSL project released an emergency security advisory warning of “Heartbleed,” a bug pulls in private keys to a server using vulnerable software, allowing operators to suck in data traffic and even impersonate the server. The server's private encryption keys are a particular target, since they're necessarily kept in working memory.