My Five: Five things worth sharing from the last week (or so), brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.
This week’s My Five is by Annie.
1. Heartbleed; what is it? and should you be worried?
Here’s our explanation of Heartbleed and what you should do next (without out getting too geeky).
The worrying security breach effects SSL/TSL, a system commonly used to safeguard transactions you make on the web. Typically, the padlock symbol next to the https in the search bar indicates that the data on the web page has been transmitted using an encryption code. This encryption code means data should be safe from anyone else looking at it that shouldn’t be. It’s worth noting that the encryption extends to passwords and personal data. In short, a small but extremely significant mistake was made by a programmer writing for SSL/TSL which effectively allowed anyone to access the encrypted data without a trace. As there is no trace of these attacks happening no one really knows who has been doing it and how many times it has happened. However, it is estimated that this flaw to the system could potentially have been in existence for the past two years.
Many sites have been affected by Heartbleed including banks, shopping sites and email accounts, so there is a very high chance that at least one service that you have used in the past two years has been compromised. The bug is fairly easy for companies to fix by updating their software. Unsurprisingly companies like Google and Yahoo have already done so.
Advice is currently being published by experts to avoid logging into internet banking or online shopping until the company can verify that they have fixed the issue. Experts have also advised to only re-set your passwords once you can confirm that the Heartbleed bug has been fixed on a particular site.
Heartbleed has been tagged as one of the most serious security breeches of the internet since its inception. It’s well worth keeping an eye on any important accounts just in case your information was stolen.
2. Google’s ‘not provided’ now applies to paid search
Google announced this week that it is extending its secure search strategy to paid search. This means that it will remove queries from referrers on ad clicks from Google.com searches. The “not provided” you have seen in analytics will now show in Adwords.
Adwords product management director Paul Feng wrote “Advertisers will continue to have access to useful data to optimize and improve their campaigns and landing pages…” “…For example, you can access detailed information in the AdWords search terms report and the Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries report.”
“The AdWords search terms report (previously known as the search query performance report) lets you see search queries that generated ad clicks along with key performance data,” he adds. “And the Search Queries report available in Google Webmaster Tools provides aggregate information about the top 2000 queries, each day, that generated organic clicks.”
3.“Lets get social!!”
The less than enthusiastic audience made us chuckle (and cringe)…
4. Alex achieves a PB in this year’s Brighton Marathon
After months of training Alex successfully completed the Brighton Marathon on Sunday with a time of 5:56:37 smashing her personal best!. CONGRATULATIONS!
Alex said…
‘The marathon was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. The last 400 yards seems like the longest distance of all… But all the pain is worth it when you cross that finish line!’
5. Browser Media’s newest (and cutest) recruit…
In other Team Browser news…
At the beginning of the week Joe introduced us to Ruby, an adorable 8 week old Vizla. Ruby will be moving into the office in a few weeks so be prepared to be in-undated with puppy pictures across our Facebook and Twitter pages.
If you can’t wait until then…here are a couple of pictures we took which I’m sure will have you ‘ooo-ing’ and ‘awww-ing’ as much as we did.
