The United States’ (US) National Security Agency (NSA) has denied exploiting the recently discovered OpenSSL bug Heartbleed after it was accused of being aware of the vulnerability prior to the public, according to a report.
Reuters reports the accusations come during a state of panic following a report by Bloomberg claiming the intelligence agency decided to keep the vulnerability quiet to better gather intelligence.
Last week, news broke the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug had made information stored in 66 per cent of all the internet’s websites susceptible to infiltration.
“The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software,” said researchers at Codenomicon, a company providing security and robustness testing solutions.
White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said: “Reports that NSA or any other part of the government were aware of the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability before April 2014 are wrong.”
“This administration takes seriously its responsibility to help maintain an open, interoperable, secure and reliable internet,” she said.
