DHAKA: A German coder admitted that he had introduced the Heartbleed, reported The Wall Street Journal, on Saturday.

But it was done by unintentionally, the programmer also said to the media.

Robin Seggelmann, a 31-year-old who now works as a contributor to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) introduced that bug on New Year`s Eve 2011 while working on bug fixes for OpenSSL.

The volunteer coder said that in a blog entry posted by the company that the error had been overlooked by multiple coders working on OpenSSL which has left millions of internet users and thousands of websites vulnerable to hackers.

"It was not intended at all, especially since I have previously fixed OpenSSL bugs myself, and was trying to contribute to the project," he said.

According to his Xing profile, Dr Seggelman has worked for Deutsche Telekom IT services subsidiary T-Systems, possibly the largest such consultancy in Germany, since 2012, as a solutions architect.

Dr Seggelman, 31, from the small town of Oelde in north-west Germany, is a contributor to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a not-for-profit global group whose mission is to make the internet work better. He is attached to the Munster University of Applied Sciences in Germany, where, as research associate in the networking programming lab in the department of electrical engineering and computer science, he has published a number of papers, including his thesis on strategies to secure internet communications in 2012. He has been writing academic papers and giving talks on security matters since 2009, while still a PhD student.

His academic research influence index score of two, based on the number of scientific citations of his work, suggests an influential thinker at the early stages of his scientific career.

BDST: 1311 HRS, APR 12, 2014