Be Still My Bleeding Heart

By now you’ve probably heard of Heartbleed, the latest threat to Internet security and your personal data. Unlike a virus or glitch, Heartbleed is an error that affects how you trade information with websites and interact with the web.

After a thorough review of our software and applications, we found that Tidal is not vulnerable to the errors found in Heartbleed. Put simply, your data, including passwords, logins and personal information, is absolutely safe. Tidal does not use the problematic software that Heartbleed exploits.

How Heartbleed works is a fascinating look into coding, security, and software. Many great outlines of the issue at hand exist, from the expert and basic to the funny. In short, Heartbleed exploits virtual handshakes that websites make millions of times per day, giving a malicious person access to data that is normally kept under wraps. This makes it an especially dangerous error, because simply changing your password will not fix the problem. Instead, a fundamental part of web security, OpenSSL, has to be fixed and updated, a slow process that puts all users at risk.

However, other sites on the web, including big companies like Google, OKCupid, and even Instagram, were affected by the error. What this means is that it is possible that, over the last two years, your password or login data may have been compromised on their servers. If you use the same login or password for multiple sites, this presents an extremely dangerous situation, where a bad person could use a stolen password from Heartbleed to take over your virtual identity. Sites are quickly updating themselves to patch the error, but not every site has caught up.

To keep yourself safe and secure, Tidal recommends that you change your passwords, both on Tidal sites and across the web, to secure and complex new ones. A full list of key websites, including updates on whether each site has patched the error, can be found on Mashable. You should also use a different password for every site, making it difficult for anyone to violate your security and compromise your identity.

Tidal takes your privacy and security seriously. We too trust the web to let us interact and share without danger, so issues like Heartbleed deeply affect our team and content. While we are glad that Tidal sites are entirely safe, the security of the web at large is still at risk. Keeping yourself educated and alert is the best way to prevent future privacy issues.

– The Tidal Team