cross pond high tech

"The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. This compromises the secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of the users and the actual content. This allows attackers to eavesdrop communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users.

 

Basically, an attacker can grab 64K of memory from a server.  The attack leaves no trace, and can be done multiple times to grab a different random 64K of memory.  This means that anything in memory -- SSL private keys, user keys, anything -- is vulnerable.  And you have to assume that it is all compromised.  All of it.

"Catastrophic" is the right word.  On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11.