A number of large tech companies, including Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, have announced that they will begin rolling out security patches in the coming days, as a result of a massive attack on their systems.
The cyber attack, dubbed Heartbleed, has been blamed on a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers.
A cyber attack on a company’s systems, usually a routine part of the security process, has caused major problems for companies including Adobe, Facebook, and Adobe Systems.
The attack also prompted the US government to impose new restrictions on companies operating in China.
Here’s what you need to know.
“We’ve seen a surge in attacks on the networks of the top five cloud providers and our largest service providers in the last few days,” Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, wrote in a blog post on Friday.
“We have seen a spike in the number of attacks that have been made, including those targeting major services.
We have also seen a new wave of attacks in the past few days that are not associated with any major company.”
The attacks came after the US National Security Agency leaked thousands of documents on Friday detailing an array of the nation’s spying programmes.
“The attacks on major cloud providers are not an anomaly,” a senior official told Reuters.
“These attacks have been occurring for years and we’ve seen them in all industries.”
Facebook and Microsoft confirmed that they had received the first wave of patches.
While it’s possible that the Shadowbrokers group is responsible for the attack, it is not clear if this is linked to the attack.
The NSA has previously released information on the Heartblee bug and the other attacks, which it says have been going on for more than a year.
The US National Intelligence Council has said that it believes the attack originated from an unknown group in the US.
