Heartbleed Flaw Leads Security Experts to Urge Password Changes

Security experts are urging consumers to change their Web passwords after the recent disclosure of a vulnerability touching wide swaths of the Internet, even as Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and large banks said they weren’t affected.

The flaw to OpenSSL, an open-source software that runs on as many as two-thirds of all active websites, was reported on April 7, by researchers who pushed out a fix. Dubbed Heartbleed, the bug could have allowed hackers to access encrypted e-mail messages, banking information, user names and passwords.