Mega breaches often garner the biggest headlines. Target in 2013 signalled the start of this, but since then we've seen Yahoo!, our own Red Cross Blood Bank, the US Department of Personnel Management and others suffer data exfiltration either by malicious parties or through human error. But something more troubling has been happening and it has me worried. Many of the protocols we rely on are under threat.

When I started working in IT, back in the 1990s, our primary focus was on reliability first and performance second. Viruses were on the scene - Word macro viruses like Melissa were probably the most significant threat of the day. But as long as our anti-virus software was up to date things were pretty good. Then the world changed.

Dear Lifehacker, There seems to always be a new, threatening bug on the horizon that has the potential to break the internet. Last year is was Shellshock and before that it was Heartbleed. So far, the internet is still standing. Do I really need to be worried about all these bugs and vulnerabilities, or is this stuff tech companies need to care about? Can someone actually use these against me?

It has been almost three months since the Heartbleed bug was revealed and many thousands of computer servers still need to be fixed.

Computer system administrators around the world are groaning again as six new security problems have been found in the OpenSSL security library.

Take a moment to jump back in your mental time machine to 31 December 1999. It was the biggest New Year's Eve for a thousand years. The dawn of a new millennium. But as we prepared to party, the world was also gripped by the fear that digital infrastructure was about to come crashing down around us.

Heartbleed, the bug that has preoccupied thousands of websites and millions of users over the past week, may well have been the biggest security flaw in internet history but it is unlikely to be the last. Our entire security infrastructure is a mess because both ordinary people and elite security experts often harbour fundamental misunderstandings about security, design and privacy.

Chrome: The Heartbleed bug is among the biggest security vulnerabilities we have seen in recent times. You could manually check sites to see if they have been impacted -- or you could use Chromebleed, an extension that tells you if the site you're on was affected by the bug.

This week, the internet has been hit with one of the biggest security scares in recent memory. It's called Heartbleed, and it sucks. In the interest of disclosure, we want to tell you what we've done to look after your information.

By now you've probably heard about the massive Heartbleed security bug that may have compromised the majority of the world's web sites. Everyone should change their passwords on the affected sites -- but only after those sites have patched the issue. Mashable is maintaining and updating a list of the most popular sites you should change your passwords for.

This week, a giant security hole came to light that affects a large portion of the internet. As different sites recover, you'll need to change your passwords, and now LastPass tells you when to do so.

If This Then That (IFTTT, one of our favourite automation services) has just emailed customers to say that it has updated its SSL service so that it is no longer vulnerable to the Heartbleed security bug. I suspect we're going to be seeing a lot of emails like this over the coming weeks.