The discovery of the Heartbleed bug left many worried about potential attacks from cyber criminals. Yet, not many expected those same criminals to fall victim to the same vulnerability. The BBC reports that researchers have been taking advantage of the weakness in internet security protocols to access information from secure chatrooms used by black hat hackers.
French anti-malware researcher Steven K told the BBC: “Darkode was vulnerable, and this forum is a really hard target,” he said. “Not many people have the ability to monitor this forum, but Heartbleed exposed everything,” referring to specially written tools to target some closed forums called Darkode and Damagelab.
This information comes as Wired magazine revealed that cloud connected devices, baby monitors, and CCTV cameras are all vulnerable to Heartbleed. Wired also pointed out that many of these devices can only be updated manually, which means the issue will cause problems for security headaches for years to come.
