Feb 25, 2017 02:34 PM EST By Khaleb Skye A. Cruz, UniversityHerald Reporter

A nasty Cloudflare leak exposed sensitive customer information throughout the internet. It may have included passwords, session cookies, authentication tokens, and even private messages.

Before the Cloudflare leak, the firm was famous for providing security and content organization services behind major internet sites like Fortune 500 companies. It tries to modify HTML pages to rewrite H TTP links, hide particular text from bots, and complicate email addresses. Read on to find out how to secure personal details.

Cloudflare leak: What happened?

PC World reported that the nasty bug in the Cloudflare leak was an older version of the HTML parser that the firm has been using for years. Unfortunately, it failed to activate until a newer HTML parser arrived in 2016. The unsuccessful activation changed the way internal web server buffers were used.

The Cloudflare leak resulted to an internal memory being transferred into some of the responses returned to users as well as to search engine crawlers. The glitch was accidentally discovered by Google security engineer Tavis Ormandy.He was working on an unrelated project when he and his colleagues noticed a weird data and alerted Cloudflare.

The latter immediately assembled an incident response team and terminated the feature that was causing most of the problem. The Cloudflare leak was first recorded on Feb 18. The good news was that an immediate fix was issued as early as Feb 20.

The company is trying hard to erase sensitive information from the caches of search engines. Moreover, the Cloudflare leak might have started since Sept 22, but the height of the glitch happened only this month. Probably, it was between Feb 13 and Feb 19.

Secure personal data against Cloudflare leak

Noting that sensitive data still lurk online, it is advisable to reset account passwords and activate two-factor authentication. The usage of a password manager to generate unique passwords for often visited websites is highly recommended indeed. On the other hand, users cannot clean up the mess all by themselves.

Then again, the Cloudflare leak affected not just passwords but cookies and authentication tokens. According to Tech Crunch, website administrators need to make a counter-move too. So far, the best option is to issue a forced password reset.

Customers hit by the Cloudflare leak may need to lose their authentication credentials for mobile apps. The Cloudflare leak is really alarming as the nasty cookie allows an attacker to log in to the site even without a password. Simply put, the attacker could pose as a regular user without being detected.

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