In which year was the Heartbleed vulnerability publicly disclosed?

In which year was the Heartbleed vulnerability publicly disclosed?

• A. 2014
• B. 2012
• C. 2016
• D. 2010

Answer: (A)

The key idea is the timeline of when Heartbleed became public knowledge. Heartbleed is a serious bug in OpenSSL’s TLS heartbeat feature that allowed reading memory from the server or client, exposing sensitive data. The important point for this question is when that vulnerability was disclosed to the public. It was revealed in 2014, with the public announcement coming in April of that year by security researchers from Google (and others). This disclosure spurred a rapid patching of OpenSSL and rotation of credentials on affected systems. The other years listed don’t match the actual public disclosure date, so 2014 is the correct year.

The key idea is the timeline of when Heartbleed became public knowledge. Heartbleed is a serious bug in OpenSSL’s TLS heartbeat feature that allowed reading memory from the server or client, exposing sensitive data. The important point for this question is when that vulnerability was disclosed to the public. It was revealed in 2014, with the public announcement coming in April of that year by security researchers from Google (and others). This disclosure spurred a rapid patching of OpenSSL and rotation of credentials on affected systems. The other years listed don’t match the actual public disclosure date, so 2014 is the correct year.