Real Incidents: The Stakes Are High

• Heartbleed (2014): an out-of-bounds read in OpenSSL leaked server memory, including private keys, to anyone.
• EternalBlue (2017): an SMB memory-corruption bug that powered the WannaCry and NotPetya worms worldwide.
• Ghostscript / CUPS (recent): memory bugs in widely deployed printing and document tooling, remotely reachable.
• Browser 0-days: use-after-free and heap bugs in Chrome / Safari / Firefox are exploited in the wild every year.

Contrast: Log4Shell (2021) was a logic / injection flaw,

not memory corruption. It shows that not every critical bug is a memory

bug, but memory bugs remain the dominant class in native software.