As you may have heard in the news the last couple of days, a new security vulnerability referred to as The Heartbleed Bug, has been discovered in a technology called OpenSSL, which is used by a number of website sites to create a secure connection between a browser and the site.  SSL stands for secure sockets layer and you see it in the URL of a website as https:// instead of the usual http://. OpenSSL is just one kind of SSL certificate, and since it’s free to use, up to 60 percent of all secure websites use OpenSSL.  Monterey County Bank does not, however, use OpenSSL to provide SSL certificates for our website.  We do recommend that our customers change their Internet banking password anyway, as a precaution.
When updating your passwords for various websites, ensure that the website was not initially impacted or that the security has been updated first, otherwise the new password may be at risk as well.  It is recommended to not re-use old passwords and create various passwords for different accounts.  If you have not done so already, please take a moment to review this month's Security Focus [PDF] pertaining to Password Security that was posted on 04/01/14.

For additional information pertaining to The Heartbleed Bug you may visit: www.heartbleed.com