NOT COOL

NSA May Have Used Heartbleed

To collect intelligence.

As if everyone didn’t already have enough reasons to hate the National Security Agency, it has now come to light that the NSA may have known about the so-called Heartbleed bug that’s spread panic across the Internet this week, and taken advantage of it to gather information. The NSA chose not to inform the public of the bug—a glitch in the way many websites protect sensitive information—and instead used it to collect passwords and other personal data while leaving average Internet users susceptible to hackers. The White House denied this claim Friday afternoon, however. "The Federal government was not aware of the recently identified vulnerability in [the encryption software] OpenSSL until it was made public in a private sector cybersecurity report," a White House spokeswoman said.