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This is an urgent message for our clients and friends who we do not provide hosting to or manage your CMS admin panel.

As you may have heard on TV/radio in the last few days, the whole internet has been rocked by the SSL vulnerability (named Heartbleed). This vulnerability essentially effects most web services (all of the services which use Open SSL, which is most - so sites like Facebook and Google have been hit too). As far as anyone is aware the vulnerability has not been exploited to gain access to users data and it’s important that I stress that we have no indication that the vulnerability has affected any of our websites at all. You can find out more about Heartbleed here: http://heartbleed.com

As you host your own website and possibly manage your own CMS software there is very little we can do to help other than give some general recommendations on how to secure your site: check with your hosting provider they have patched the SSL bug, then reset all individual website passwords and then set about reseting database passwords for those websites that use them. There is little point in making any changes until your web host has made sure your site is either un-affected by the vulnerability or has been patched.

As a further word of advice we would recommend you look at your user names and passwords for other web services, but this is of course up to you. We would recommend checking with your various service providers before updating your passwords for other services to ensure that they too have patched the vulnerability. 

We certainly don’t want to unduly alarm you but this vulnerability has been a serious concern for the internet at large and we would be irresponsible if we didn’t take action on your behalf.

Thank you for your attention.

Best wishes,

Mark.

mark.bate@batebrand.com