Heartbleed exploited a flaw in TLS certificate validation, allowing fake certificates to be accepted without warnings.

Heartbleed injected malware into encrypted traffic streams by corrupting the SSL handshake protocol.

Heartbleed spread automatically across the internet by exploiting DNS vulnerabilities in OpenSSL.

Heartbleed manipulated hardware cryptographic modules (HSMs) to leak stored private keys.

Heartbleed enabled attackers to downgrade HTTPS connections to HTTP automatically.

Heartbleed allowed attackers to break RSA encryption by factoring large primes in the server’s public key.

Heartbleed abused the TLS heartbeat extension to read arbitrary chunks of server memory without leaving traces in logs.

Heartbleed only affected client-side browsers and did not affect server-side systems.

Heartbleed allowed attackers to overwrite server memory, leading directly to permanent system compromise.

Heartbleed enabled direct decryption of all encrypted traffic, even when perfect forward secrecy was enabled.