The Latest in IT Security

By Mark Hosenball and Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House and U.S. intelligence agencies said on Friday neither the National Security Agency nor any other part of the government were aware before this month of the Heartbleed bug, denying a report that the spy agency exploited the glitch in widely used Web encryption technology to gather intelligence. The White House, the NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued statements after Bloomberg reported that the NSA was aware of the bug for at least two years and exploited it in order to obtain passwords and other basic information used in hacking operations. Reports that NSA or any other part of the government were aware of the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability before April 2014 are wrong, White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in a statement.