First 'Heartbleed' attacker charged

Canadian police have arrested a 19-year-old man and charged him in connection with exploiting the "Heartbleed" bug to steal taxpayer data from a government website, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said.

In what appeared to be the first report of an attack using a flaw in software known as OpenSSL, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) said this week that about 900 social insurance numbers and possibly other data had been compromised as a result of an attack on its site.

The suspect, Stephen Solis-Reyes, was arrested at his home in London, Ontario overnight and faces criminal charges of unauthorised use of computer and mischief in relation to data.

"It is believed that Solis-Reyes was able to extract private information held by CRA by exploiting the vulnerability known as the Heartbleed bug," the RCMP said in a statement.

Police seized Solis-Reyes' computer equipment and scheduled his court appearance for July 17, 2014.

Internet companies, technology providers, businesses and government agencies have been scrambling to figure out whether their systems are vulnerable to attack since the flaw was disclosed a week ago.

Security experts have warned that more attacks will follow.

The bug is the result of a coding error in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic library, and affects billions of servers, clients and devices around the world. It was made public on April 8 this year, but has existed in vulnerable versions of OpenSSL for the past two years.